Subject: Re: 69030 Dual HiQVideo Support on MIPS arch
To: None <port-mips@netbsd.org>
From: Toru Nishimura <locore32@gaea.ocn.ne.jp>
List: port-mips
Date: 10/01/2003 19:09:16
anand lalgondar said;

> May be later some time I would do that for sure, but at present my priority 
> is to support 69030 Card on my Target Board.
> 
> PS: The earlier question were put up by my colleague.

Okay, I see.  I suggest you take a glance at WSCONS TGA PCI graphics driver
found in dev/pci/tga.c.  You would be benefited from it, I think.

I'm a person who wrote various WSCONS drivers for TURBOchannel graphics
option card.  The outcome can be seen at dev/tc/*fb.c which show examples of
how NetBSD rastercons subcomponent is used for framebuffer video console.

The answer for the very first Q "Is it possible to use generic VGA framework of
NetBSD for MIPS?" was "No".   Smarter (extended) VGA hardwares depend more
on Intel/Windows runtime profile, aka, PC compatibles, and hardly useful in other
hardware contexts, say MIPS RISC in this case.   Quick glance of 69030 chip
brought me a promising impression.  Hope the 4MB video memory is manipulatable
directly from CPU.  Your mirage would be tough, I'm afraid, because it's a hard
work to initialize video hardware (from scratch!) during very embryonic stage of OS
startup given little help from standard NetBSD kernel APIs.  Good luck.

PS: I'm tossing an idea to make WSCONS framebuffer driver tailored for built-in
graphics in a certain i486 SoC.  It happens behaving standard VGA this moment,
but I would be more satisfied with workstation grade raster console instead. Probably
your effort and mine will be similar each other...

Toru Nishimura/ALKYL Technology