[Xorg] can't xorg detect on bootup which gfx card is installed?

Jakub Stachowski qbast at go2.pl
Sun Aug 15 14:59:31 PDT 2004


Dnia niedziela, 15 sierpnia 2004 21:45, Adam Jackson napisał:
> On Sunday 15 August 2004 17:40, Kristof Vansant wrote:
> > root at lupus:/home/lupus# lspci | grep VGA
> > 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV20 [GeForce3 Ti
> > 500] (rev a3)
> >
> > so the driver is nv, I don't understand what the problem is.
>
> Please stop top-posting.
>
> The problem is that we have no way to bind a PCI ID to a driver before the
> driver is loaded.  We don't have a database anywhere saying "this chip id
> means i need this driver".  Clearly you as a human can look at the pretty
> PCI name and know, but the server isn't that smart yet.  What we'd want to
> do is put that list in the driver itself, so when we first dlopen the
> driver we can ask it what PCI IDs it supports.
>

So only PCI bus is important? 

> And in fact we have all the necessary information in the drivers already -
> since they all have to check for supported chips somehow - it's just a
> matter of factoring that out into a common data structure and teaching the
> server to read that at module open time.

It could be function - so for example fbdev could check if framebuffer device 
is available and report that it supports all devices (if fbdev available) or 
none (if not).

>
> The problem here would be stupid buses like ISA, but I'm perfectly willing
> to tell people insane enough to use ISA video cards that they need to
> explicitly specify their driver or else be stuck with vga(4) or vesa(4).  I
> think pretty much every other bus type (maybe excluding VLB) is capable of
> sane self-identification.

Some kind of 'priority' field would be useful - so only if specific (for given 
card) driver  is unavailable, server will fall back to less preferred, 
catch-all drivers as vga, vesa or fbdev.

>
> - ajax
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