On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 08:37:57PM +1100, Malcolm Herbert wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:54:16 +0000, "The Fungi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>said:
> > Well, *finding* a low-power, 3.3V-only, 32-bit, PCI video card could
> > be a bit of challenge. There have been some list posts in the past
> > about using Soekris boards with USB video devices, however, which
> > could be a much easier solution.
> 
> ... does it need to be 3.3v only?  I found a 32-bit 3.3v/5.0v card which
> I've put in and it doesn't seem to have smoked the net5501 at all ...
> the NetBSD 4.0 GENERIC recognises it but can't drive it, so that's
> hopeful at least ... 

You need to run it to be sure about the power consumption.
I've done a few 4801 with Matrox G450 cards.
The BIOS doesn't initialize the card as VGA/textmode, so it is useless
for console.
X11 was picky about the uninitialized card as well - I needed to use the
mga_hal to get it running.
Once X11 started the box rebootet because of power problems, which I
solved by using a 5V supply directly to the board.
Without the card setup I have had no power problem.
I'm not sure if it would work in textmode, since I'm just running X11.

> For the record, the card is labelled as an ATI, which the kernel thinks
> is:
> 
> ATI Technologies Radeon 7000/VE QY (VGA display) at pci0 dev 14 function
> 0 not configured
> 
> although why NetBSD GENERIC doesn't include support for this I don't
> know ...

I don't know about NetBSD, but my assumption is that this is because the
card isn't setup to emulate a standard VGA, so the system ignores is.
At least FreeBSD's syscons seems to be limited to cards, which are setup
at usual ISA addresses - there are/were a few exceptions with DEC cards
used in alpha systems.

-- 
B.Walter                http://www.bwct.de      http://www.fizon.de
[EMAIL PROTECTED]           [EMAIL PROTECTED]            [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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