On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Erik Winkler wrote:

> I have an 8500 with an ATI XCLAIM 3D card in the first PCI card slot.
> Does the current version of netbsd support this card?

No, the current version of NetBSD does not support _any_ display cards.
It only supports OpenFirmware framebuffers in a very simplistic way that
turns out to be useful.  So, the relevant question _for NetBSD_ is how
well can you get OpenFirmware to support this card.  I'm working on
getting this and some other stuff cleaned up for Havard, but it'd be great
if you could try it out now and see if it works.

I'd say, try the output-device thing first, and then try the nvramrc hack
if it doesn't work.  But don't give up until you have tried both!  The
second is rather difficult, and shouldn't be ignored for that reason.  It
was, as you can see, written by an OF expert at Apple, and was referred to
earlier on this list (which is why I found it).

---

Linux has a FAQ entry(ies) for this.  The Faq-O-Matic is rather chaotic, so 
 you might even find information scattered about elsewhere, but here are 
 two places whre I found some:
  http://www.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jonh/lppc/faq.pl?file=322
  http://www.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jonh/lppc/faq.pl?file=207

And a cleaned-up summary of what they've got so far:

Apple
8600		/chaos/control

Power Computing's 7200-ish boxes
PowerWave	/bandit/ATY,XCLAIM

9500/180MP	/bandit@F{2,4}000000/ATY,mach64		[onboard? ATI chip]
				    /ATY,XCLAIM
				    /ATY,264VT
		                    /IMS,tt128mb8A	[TwinTurbo PCI card]
		note: this box has two PCI boxes, hence you substitute 
		either 2 or 4 for {2,4} above.

These settings are obviously not magic.  You can try:

	/bandit/@x

where x is a hex number between B and 1F describing what PCI ``slot'' the 
card is in.  Or, you can specify the card-type's symbolic name 
(the MAN,driver_name thing) and let OF iterate over all the slots looking 
for the card [XXX -- is this what it really does?].  If your machine has 
more than one PCI bus, you may need to add an @ after the ``bandit'' to 
specify which bus it's on, because OF for some inexcusable reason seems to 
be unwilling to iterate over several PCI busses looking for a card:

	/bandit@xxxxxxxx/name_of_card

In practice, dev and ls probably make it trivial to get the right name for 
your card.  In fact, you may be better off just using dev and ls, and 
ignoring the table above (but don't tell the Linux people that!  ``Do you 
have an init string for my modem?'' :)


Another problem with screen-consoles on some OF revisions is deeper timing 
bugs in the OF drivers for the various cards.  Sometimes these can be evaded 
with nvramrc hacks.  Only one such hack is known as of this writing, and 
appears below.

Here's a trick for the ``PowerMac 7200, 7500, 7600, 8500, 9500'' machines 
with OF 1.0.5 by Alan Mimms <alanm@unforgettable.com>, who says good luck 
but asks that you please not ask him for help if it doesn't work for you:

 http://www.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jonh/lppc/faq.pl?file=378

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:+1 720 841-8308 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US