Re: PCI graphics cards on Sun hardware

[Eduardo Horvath <eeh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, raymond.meyer%rambler.ru@localhost wrote:

> So why do they have this initialisation code requirement? Other PCI
> cards just work, i.e. network and storage, what's so special about
> graphics cards? Do all graphics cards depend on this code, or some do
> and some don't? Is there a good way to find out which ones do?

I got two theories:

a) The turnover rate on these things is so high that the hardware 
engineers don't have time to do a good job.

b) ATI and Nvidia are trying so hard to keep everything they do secret 
from each other that they figure if they put important stuff in the BIOS 
code then the other company won't be able to figure it out.

I think b) is the more likely explanation, especially considering the 
number of hoops we needed to jump through to get the XVR50 working on 
SPARC motherboards.  (Just have the chip read the soft-strap data from the 
system BIOS.  Yeah, right.)

Eduardo