LinuxBios on SC2200 board from National

[Peter Stuge]

On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 04:19:12PM +0530, Yogesh Desai wrote:
> ** Proprietary **

Please refrain from sending confidential, proprietary or similar emails to
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your email and answer your question(s).  Please also note that emails sent
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> We have SC2200 board from National and being trying with ExpressROM biose
> code given by National.
> 
> Will it be advisable to boot the board with LinuxBios and still use all
> the pheripheral interfaces and displays.
> 
> Please help

Judging from this you want us to read and reply so here goes:

Christer Weinigel has implemented support for the SCx2xx Geodes in
LinuxBIOS.  Check out the nano platform in the source tree.  Some of the
features in the Geode depend on VSA helper ROMs however and there is
currently no VSA support in LinuxBIOS.

In effect this means that you can't use XpressGRAPHICS or XpressAUDIO (yet).

The kernel framebuffer driver from NatSemi will work just fine without
XpressGRAPHICS though - it's just legacy VGA emulation that doesn't work.

XpressAUDIO is required for the NatSemi Linux OSS driver to work, so no
sound will be available.

There has been talk about implementing support for VSA2 in LinuxBIOS and
some discussion on licensing issues for the VSA ROM blobs included with the
BLDT (aka XpressLOADER) but no code has been written yet.  This might
partly be because we're out of documentation and maybe partly because noone
has really needed it yet.


//Peter