On Fri, 24 Apr 1998, Michael R Zucca wrote:

> > I'm setting up a IIci I just picked up (retiring a IIcx, SE/30 stil going
> > strong) with 1.3.1, and had it boot off just the 8/24 card in order to
> > avoid the slowdown of DRAM based internal video.  I expected this config
> > to be honored when I went into NetBSD, but the 8/24 screen wasn't cleared
> > and when I hooked up my monitor to the internal video out, I got nothing.
> > Serial console confirms it boots into single user fine (saying
> > rc.conf needs to be defined).  What's going on?
> 
> Since the internal video of the IIci shares memory with the rest of the
> machine, if you turn off internal video or fail to hook up a monitor to
> the monitor port the memory map chnages enough to confuse NetBSD.

Is it confused to the point where there is effectively no display in this
case?

> This is a long standing bug and it's kind of tricky to fix the kernel
> to work around it. However, making your machine work should be as easy
> as putting a monitor adapter or rigging a paper-clip to make the machine
> think there's a monitor on the internal video port. This, of course,
> still gives you the DRAM video slow-down but it works.

Well since I'm actually planning on running the machine headless, I don't
care about internal video at all.  Actually, if it really isn't
initializing DRAM video at all, I can live with serial console, since it
will be headless and I want the performance gain of no DRAM video.  Am I
understanding this correctly?

--
Nathan Raymond