Re: [RFC] Reliable video POSTing on resume

From: Kendall Bennett
Date: Thu Feb 10 2005 - 15:49:03 EST


Hi Guys,

I have missed all the original emails in this thread. I was trying to re-subscribe to the lkml a few days ago (I just switched over to Thunderbird) but I haven't been getting any traffic. So I will try again.

The one thing I can say is that having worked extensively with ATI cards, there are some registers that have an effect on whether the BIOS image shows up on at the ROM BAR address or not. To get all the ATI cards we have working, we have had to massage some of those registers because after the POST has been run, they will cause the BIOS image to disappear (not intentionally on ATI's part, but a side effect I think).

Note that the cards that require this work just fine if they are in a cold boot state when you run the POST - they only have issues after the POST code has been run (which actually affects X drivers trying to read the BIOS PLL information too).

So perhaps this problem is something similar?

Regards,

Jon Smirl said the following on 2/10/2005 12:34 PM:
I added Kendall from Scitech to the CC list. He is the expert on
getting VBIOS's to post. Maybe he can help.

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:29:47 +0000, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 15:17 -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:08:15 +0000, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It also explicitly states that Windows 2000 and XP don't support this,
which leads me to suspect that vendors no longer expect POSTing to be
possible after initial system boot.

No, it means that some of my ATI cards don't function as secondary
adapters on 2K and XP.

And nor will any other card that requires POSTing (assuming that it
isn't just ATI being less than honest about driver shortcomings). And
we've certainly seen in the past that removing support for functionality
in Windows tends to result in hardware no longer supporting that
functionality.

I have real, shipping hardware here that fails if you simply try to
execute the video BIOS POST code. If you think this is due to a
shortcoming in existing BIOS emulations, I'm more than happy to dump the
video and system BIOS regions and send them to you.

--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx






--
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~

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