On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 21:13 -0400, Timothy Normand Miller wrote:
> > must reasonably expect to be able to access the card through the VGA
> > registers, as it cannot know where the card's PCI resources have been
> > mapped, right? Therefore, I guess that the X driver has to tell the card
> 
> Check this out:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS

Heh, now that you mention it, I even remember it from writing protected
mode DOS games many years ago. :)

However, that does not seem to be the entire story, because I'm
currently browsing through the X driver for S3 cards, and it definitely
uses the real VGA ports to do things with the card. It's guarded by some
functions that seem to be controlling access to VGA hardware inside the
X server, but it in turn uses some very indirect calls to do the actual
work, and I have yet to find where they are initialized and defined.

I also found this:
<http://www.x.org/wiki/PciReworkProposal>
Point 7 under "Required Functionality" covers the fact that the X server
hackers want VGA ownership arbitration, so there clearly is a need to
turn VGA legacy decode on and off.

I'll continue my research.

Fredrik Tolf


_______________________________________________
Open-graphics mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)

Reply via email to