[LinuxBIOS] [Patch] Fix CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA handling in default pci_dev_init.

Torsten Duwe duwe at lst.de
Thu Jan 3 12:05:02 CET 2008


On Thursday 03 January 2008, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> > It was considered. I think there is a bigger picture than you might
> > have realised. Torsten also pointed out a secondary issue.
>
> CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA is not the right solution in that case. Maybe
> CONFIG_VGA_ROM_RUN should be trivially introduced.

To not increase the obvious confusion further, I would call the option 
something negative, like ...SKIP_NON_VGA, so nobody assumes it enables any 
ROM execution. Maybe introduce this for v3.

> > I read your patch. I am still unsure of the case where there are vga
> > class devices but we don't want a vga console (hint: GPU computing).
>
> As one of the main radeonhd driver developers, i am rather acutely aware
> of gpgpu. But i fail to see the relevance of this here.

Indeed. PCI_ROM_RUN will do, regardless of the console.

> > It seems there is no way in your code to allow us to run the option
> > ROMs for a "vga" device and not enable a vga console.
>
> My patch allows this in the exact same manner as before. Please look at
> the resulting code.
>
> The real question is:
> What happens the unerring linuxbios user only specificies only
> CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA, and still expects it to work with a vga rom. But
> this is a purely an issue of bad former practice and bad documentation.

Nope, it's a *bug* noone has noticed until you tried. We can now fix the code 
or redefine the semantics. Your patch implicitly does the latter, and without 
further explanation I assumed you didn't understand them. Ron already 
mentioned this is v2, so I'd say let's go for it; original patch ACKed.

If you had mentioned that CONSOLE_VGA=1 PCI_ROM_RUN=0 does not compile and you 
are working on a free standing driver, that would have saved us from the 
irrelevant part of this discussion.

So if nobody objects I'll commit the original patch, after the west coast has 
had a chance to comment ;-)

	Torsten




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