[LinuxBIOS] Interest in a Free Software BIOS for Radeon cards?

Torsten Duwe duwe at lst.de
Mon Dec 10 01:19:45 CET 2007


On Sunday 09 December 2007, Oliver McFadden wrote:

> I believe the parser in radeonhd is also compiled into the BIOS flashed to
> the card. I guessed this from some left over preprocessor defines, etc.

Not quite,

> As far as I know, the AtomBIOS on the card consists of an interpreter in
> x86 code, some binary scripts executed by the interpreter, and some data
> tables, all wrapped up inside the PCI expansion ROM format.

That's right. My understanding is AtomBIOS basically consists of tables/code 
run by an interpreter. The card's ROM has one, and radeonHD has a different 
one.

> The opcodes and format of the binary scripts and data tables are described
> by the parser code, so I think there is enough information, except for how
> to actually flash the on-card ROM...

My first interest is to _use_ AtomBIOS cards, and hence I started working on 
getting the interpreter glued to LinuxBIOS. At least my monitor currently  
stays totally black with LinuxBIOS, until X comes up, see my previous mails 
to this list.

	Torsten




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