On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 06:19:46PM +0100, Christian Zietz wrote: > Hi, > > Egbert Eich schrieb: > > > I think it would be worthwhile to investigate the origin or the problem > > and report it to Intel to fix it in the BIOS - in case they have broken > > something. It looks like an endless loop to me. > > I made some research with a little tool of mine which allows me to load > and use another BIOS than the pre-installed one. (This tool is NOT going > to be released.) > The BIOS dump I got from an Inspiron 510m crashes under DOS, too. This > crash only occurs for CX (device number) 0x01. It's not an endless loop > but a jump to "nowhere". Let me explain: Depending on the device number > the address of the function to call is taken from a table. This fails > for device 1 and isn't properly caught so a jump to the middle of some > other (totally unrelated) function is executed. That obviously leads to > the crash. > BIOS build 3197 (which can be obtained from the Intel web site) doesn't > have that bug. Since the table with the addresses is in the (partially) > user configurable BIOS data block, the missing table entry could also be > a configuration error made by Dell. But as Dell's policy towards Linux > is "we don't support it", chances are low to get a new BIOS asking there.
Christian, Is there a string 'DELL' or similar in the BIOS that we can use the function xf86ReadBIOS() to detect this buggy BIOS and skip using this function call in this case ? Alan. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
