I have had some experience with EFI while working on IA64. The primary issue I see is executing the card bios and by extension issues with vbe. With at least one system vendor the card bios which is x86 is not executed during post because native x86 execution support has been disabled. The system vendor wishes all device vendors to provide EFI post code to get around this problem. I doubt this is realistic. There are definitely problems with cards on these systems, my suspicion, but unproven, is that some of the problems derive from differences in posting, especially with regards to legacy VGA and the inability of higher level code to utilize card bios functionality.
With respect to XFree86 there are most definitely issues surrounding the int10 module and vbe which are used during initialization. Current ia64 ports of some the drivers turn off use of these modules because of the conflicts with the attendant loss of functionality in some cases. Posting secondary cards needs to be via EFI. IMHO, EFI is an issue we have yet to deal with successfully, much is unknown. Posting is somewhat of a black art understood by only a few. I'm not sure the system vendor in question understands the fundamental issues themselves. I am happy to work with others in solving the EFI/Post issues on ia64. To date I've done a fair amount of work looking at the issues, but as of yet do not have a satisfactory answer. John [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
