Geode Video Xfree86 and VSA

Christer Weinigel christer at weinigel.se
Wed May 21 05:01:01 CEST 2003


Bari Ari <bari at onelabs.com> writes:

> Anyone know the current status of running XFree86 on the Geodes?

I did get XFree86 3.something running fine on a GX1 + CS5530 with
Linxbios using the Geode Framebuffer driver to set up the display and
then just using the unaccelerated XF86_FBDev.  On the SC2200 XFree86
did not work, but that's because XFree86 tries to mess with the
keyboard controller directly and then hangs in a loop waiting for the
keyboard controller to stop being busy.  Fix that problem in XFree86
and it should be no problem.

I haven't tried the accelerated geode drivers.

> I'm currently looking at working on getting the VSA running on the
> Geodes as a BLOB. Anyone else started on this yet?

I've just looked briefly at it, but if I remember correctly, what's
needed is to copy the VSA BIOS to ram somewhere below 640k (since it
should be started in real mode) and then jumped into.  The BIOS has to
provide a few INT 15h functions to report the current memory size.
There might be some additional restraints such as only certain base
addresses working (since only XpressROM/Insyde use this) or that the
VSA code relies on a certain layout of the rest of the BIOS in ROM.

Famous last words: how hard can it be :)

  /Christer

-- 
"Just how much can I get away with and still go to heaven?"

Freelance consultant specializing in device driver programming for Linux 
Christer Weinigel <christer at weinigel.se>  http://www.weinigel.se



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