I tried some experiments tonight on 1.4 before I bring my scratch machines
up to -current, and found that multiple vga card support isn't usable,
probably because neither we nor the BIOS ensure that secondary vga cards
get initialized correctly.

On my i386 (Iwill XA100 PentiumMMX-233) the BIOS recognizes all three cards
in the "big banner" that always scrolls off the screen before you can read
it, but it only appears to be running the complete firmware init code on one
of them, because I expect to see a text banner from the video card vendor
on each card, and I don't get one.

Once netbsd boots up, it attaches the "primary" card as vga1 and reports
the other cards as PCI devices not configured.

On my arm32 (Chalice CATS SA110-233) the x86 emulator that is used to boot
up video cards takes so long to run that I must conclude something hung.
This of course only happens with more than one vga board plugged in; if
there is only one vga board then everything proceeds normally.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com