Re: Clean BIOS booting Mandrake 9 via LILO

Hi,

> > 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.
>
> This is a pretty smart idea, but surely the X Driver sets up
> everything in ...Save() on init?  I was disappointed Sunday to find
> that when booting up via cromwell, including X starting as usual,
> that the TV remained blank.

You mean does X program all the registers? No, currently it doesn't. 
Originally the driver used only the framebuffer mode, i.e. the kernel 
framebuffer driver would be responsible for mode switching (which 
fails because of the missing VESA bios).

For the XVideo extensions I added most of the register setup, although 
the driver still uses the framebuffer mode. At the moment it will 
save the current register state, do all the calculations for the new 
mode and then setup the registers - but not all of them. To make 
things work I simply commented out those registers that produced 
garbage on my screen when programmed. Whether this is due to a wrong 
modeline or some other driver issue I haven't investigated yet.

In particular, none of the timing parameter is currently set in the X 
driver. If the graphics chipset is not initialized by the BIOS then X 
won't output anything either.

-Oliver


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