Re: Why video region busy?

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Mon, 13 Dec 1999 16:24:14 -0800 (PST)


On Mon, 13 Dec 1999, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> Older S3 cards use region 0xA0000 - 0xAFFFF for their MMIO region.
>
> I would like to grab this region using request_mem_region, but it is
> universally marked busy for all x86 kernels. :(

Indeed.

Because the PC spec _says_ it is busy, exactly for video cards.

I initially marked only the "regular" video card region busy (the part
that was handled by the text-mode driver), but it quickly became apparent
that in order to make dynamic area allocation work for things like PCMCIA
we had to mark the whole video area busy.

> My code currently avoids resource management and just directly writes to
> 0xA0000 -- not a good solution.

Why not? I can basically guarantee that it's going to be marked busy for
you.

Linus

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