X Server setup on ARM Board with PCI VGA card

[Tiago Vignatti]

Alan Cox escreveu:
> On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:39:45 -0800
> "Rupesh Kumar" <a.rupesh.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi All,
>>
>> My goal is to make a VGA card work on ARM system
>> I am seeing two issues in this kind of setup
>>    1.Legacy VGA Range support.(My board doesnt support this I/O Range).
>>    2.Running the VGA BIOS.(BIOS Contains i386 image which cant be run on ARM).
>> The card which can run as Secondary Adapter cant use the legacy range.
>> so my first issue is solved.
>>
>> Does a VGA card run without running its VGA BIOS.
> 
> Yes if you have complete enough documentation on how to configure the
> hardware and bring it up. For some video chipsets this is in the public
> domain for a lot of others it is not.
> 
> X.org also contains an x86 emulator which may help, but if the BIOS
> itself uses legacy vga ranges to configure the chip that might not help.

Hi Rupesh. Just for completeness, there's a good documentation regarding 
the initialization of graphic cards here [0]. Unfortunately FreeVGA 
relies on the VGA BIOS to initialize the card -- which I know is not 
your goal -- but in the other hand does not require any knowledge of 
proprietary hardware information.

BTW, anyone here already had some success with FreeVGA lately? (sorry 
for hijack your thread, Rupesh :)


my regards,

[0] http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix05/tech/freenix/lo.html

-- 
Tiago Vignatti
C3SL - Centro de Computação Científica e Software Livre
www.c3sl.ufpr.br