On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 02:25:43PM -0500, vinai wrote: > > and even that isn't the full story. You can use many IDE and SCSI > > controllers without executing the built-in firmware at all, and you > > can use some graphics cards without having to rely on the firmware. > > As long as the driver you use initialises the electronic and logical > > properties of that specific PCI card correctly, it will work (or so I > > heard). > > I think you're correct here. I remember some folks mentioning (either > here or on linuxppc-dev) being able to use some PCI IDE controllers > under linux that don't work under Mac OS (classic or X). I also seem to > remember someone mentioning using non-OF graphics cards, but that one I > am less sure of.
What I've heard is that you can usually use them, but you usually can't boot from them. You can stick a $15 IDE card in a Mac and put drives on it, but you still have to boot from the internal interface (or some other Mac-native bootable device). I think you can do the same with some graphics cards and you just won't get a console until the framebuffer driver initializes the card, but I seem to remember that there are other problems related to silly PC architecture. The same thing applies to some other PCI-based hardware, like Sun Ultras. Even running Solaris, you can usually use a cheap SCSI card that has the same LSI Logic chipset as the Sun card, but you won't be able to boot from a disk on that card because it doesn't have Sun's firmware. -- Michael Heironimus
