Re: Clean BIOS booting Mandrake 9 via LILO

Hi,

> Good news, the 256KByte Clean BIOS (cromwell) is booting up a
> normal Mandrake 9 install here, without needing the boot CD or any
> FATX contact.

Good news indeed.

> The result is a fully
> functional and active boot, except for the one remaining fly in the
> ointment: video is not properly inited yet.  We are getting some
> syncs from the video chip to the encoder, but right now they are
> the wrong frequency and the frequency changes from boot to boot. 
> Ryan's work with Dirk Thierbach, the author of nvtv may give us a
> second way to achieve proper init.

I don't know if it has ever been mentioned before, but there's an 
almost complete register description of the NVIDIA TNT chips shipped 
with the Linux kernel. It can be found in drivers/video/riva/nv4ref.h 
for 2.4 kernels. Since it has a GPL licence I guess it's legal to 
use. Maybe it helps you to figure out which register values to set. 

Another thought: In the X driver there's a function NVDACSave(...) 
which will store all relevant registers to some data structures to 
restore the previous mode later. It should be easy to dump all the 
register contents to a file. This way we can figure out which values 
are used after the native Dashboard boot.

Regards,

Oliver


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Get the new Palm Tungsten T
handheld. Power & Color in a compact size!
http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?palm0002en