On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote:

>> >01:00.0 Class 0300: 1002:5148 (rev 80)
>> >thank you
>> 
>> No, thank you!   ;o)  I've just updated our hardware database to 
>> autodetect the FireGL 8700 as 1002:5148
>> 
>> Does anyone know what the ATI FireGL 8800's PCI ID is?  I'll add 
>> that one too.
>
>Is there enough pattern to the ATI PCI chip ids to guess which
>driver to use for unknown chips?

The ATI hardware documentation provides enough information to 
know what family (Mach64/R128/Radeon R100/RV100/R200/RV200) 
wether or not it is a Mobility chip, and which one, etc.  I 
haven't noticed anywhere in the docs which show the actual board 
names used to market the video hardware such as "Xpert@Work 98", 
"FireGL 8700", etc.  A fair number of these ID's we can 
autodetect and point to the right driver, since if XFree86 
supports the card, then it has the PCI ID listed internally, and 
we can just use that info to provide the right driver.

If I'm unsure if a card will work or not, and don't have one, I 
look at the docs, and the code, and try to add support that will 
hopefully work (and mostly has so far).  However I may not know a 
given card is a "ATI Radeon 7200" per se. (random example).  So 
users wont actually see "ATI Radeon 7200" show up as 
autodetected currently, they'll see "ATI Radeon QD" or whatever 
it happens to be.

By the way... what is the "lspci -vn" output of a Radeon 7000, 
7200 so I can make these autodetect with proper names.  ;o)


>For example we could have guessed that the 1002:5148 would user
>the same driver as 1002:5144 - 1002:5148. When we add the ID to
>the hardware database it isn't as if we actually change the
>driver in any way.

Well, when it is added to XFree86 xf86PciInfo.h, the driver does 
need to change, so whoever is making those changes needs to know 
if it is a Radeon or whatever, or what driver it should get added 
to, as the conditional code paths in the given driver will need 
to be updated for the new card.

That coupled with the ATI tech specs allows me to set up the 
PCItable to choose the right driver.  For some hardware we may 
not know if it _works_, but that is what beta testing is for.  If 
something doesn't work, it can be fixed and/or disabled, or the 
"vesa" driver used temporarily instead.

I'm looking into getting a more proper official list of the PCI 
ID's and the marketing names they map into, so users will see the 
name of their actual card as it says on the box rather than 
seeing "ATI Radeon QW" or similar in dialogs, etc.

Take care!
TTYL



-- 
Mike A. Harris                  Shipping/mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer             190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie,
XFree86 maintainer              Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3
Red Hat Inc.
http://www.redhat.com           ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris

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