Subject: Re: Radeon framebuffer (the story continues)
To: Michael Lorenz <macallan@netbsd.org>
From: Vincent <10.50@free.fr>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/27/2006 22:31:32
Michael,
> Certainly, even though I can't test it.
I will send you that tomorrow.
> Ah, so it /did/ find the video BIOS but can't make sense of it.
> Any chance to update your BIOS ( and hope that would also update the DFP
> table ) ?
None whatsoever. I guess nobody cares about a piece of silicium 5 years
old (read: heap of crap) that only knows about NetBSD! :)
> Another way would be to look at the radeon driver in xorg or xfree and
> see if/how they make sense of such a table - with some luck it's not too
> different from version 3 and can be added to radeonfb.
I've done that. To no avail. DFT table prior to revision 3 do not seem
to hold the necessary info. Or nobody managed to get the right
information about it. I went ahead reading some code of the xorg radeon
driver written by the Gatos project. I understand the code, but little
of what is underlying it. I can't get anything solid on the Radeon BIOS
structure or registers besides lines of code with hard-coded offset and
absconse structure. Nothing out on Internet. That's a pain. I don't like
to cut/copy verbatim pieces of software that I don't understand. I can't
figure out why datasheets explaining all that stuff is not available,
either. There seems to be a bunch of (Windows closed source) Radeon BIOS
twickers around, made up God knows with what documentation, since
nothing seems to be released . I can't see the point of ATI or nVIDIA in
denying wide-access to their specs. That's way beyond the grasp of my
small intellect.
Vincent