PCI card bios accessibility

Richard Smith rsmith at bitworks.com
Fri Mar 5 16:32:00 CET 2004


Tina Declerck wrote:

> Thank you.  I'm not questioning the functionality of the driver, however,
> some customers like to configure 3ware RAID using the 3ware bios.  If it
> is called during the system boot the driver isn't involved. This is not
> taking anything from existing functionality but trying to see if
> the functions currently available with other BIOSes is or will be available
> with the Linux BIOS.

Hmmm... There will probally to be a lot of work then to make this go 
good enough for you.  You are talking lots of video and keyboard input 
functions.  LB provides only minimal system bios service suppport.  Even 
though the video bios may run under the emulator theres lots of support 
bios calls that are just empty functions.    The bulk of the bios 
emulation has just been toward getting the video card up enough that it 
can produce text and that a framebuffer driver can take over and take it 
up the rest of the way. (or the X driver)

I'm not saying it can't ever work but that someone is going to have to 
spend a lot of time filling in the necesary bios code.  You guys have 
control over your bios so you may be able to minimize the dependency on 
system bios services.

No need to wait for integration into LB to test though. The emulator is 
available now and runs as a user program.  It's probally a good idea to 
give it a whirl on your card and see what int services it whines about.

> DISCLAIMER: The information contained in this electronic mail transmission
> is intended by 3ware for the use of the named individual or entity to which
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You my want to drop this for list posts. I know on some lists people 
will refuse to answer posts that contain verbage like this.

-- 
Richard A. Smith
rsmith at bitworks.com





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