Subject: Re: Radeon framebuffer (the story continues)
To: Michael Lorenz <macallan@netbsd.org>
From: Vincent <10.50@free.fr>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/27/2006 22:31:32
Michael,

> Certainly, even though I can't test it.

I will send you that tomorrow.

> Ah, so it /did/ find the video BIOS but can't make sense of it.
> Any chance to update your BIOS ( and hope that would also update the DFP 
> table ) ?

None whatsoever. I guess nobody cares about a piece of silicium 5 years 
old (read: heap of crap) that only knows about NetBSD! :)

> Another way would be to look at the radeon driver in xorg or xfree and 
> see if/how they make sense of such a table - with some luck it's not too 
> different from version 3 and can be added to radeonfb.

I've done that. To no avail. DFT table prior to revision 3 do not seem 
to hold the necessary info. Or nobody managed to get the right 
information about it. I went ahead reading some code of the xorg radeon 
driver written by the Gatos project. I understand the code, but little 
of what is underlying it. I can't get anything solid on the Radeon BIOS 
structure or registers besides lines of code with hard-coded offset and 
absconse structure. Nothing out on Internet. That's a pain. I don't like 
to cut/copy verbatim pieces of software that I don't understand. I can't 
figure out why datasheets explaining all that stuff is not available, 
either. There seems to be a bunch of (Windows closed source) Radeon BIOS 
twickers around, made up God knows with what documentation, since 
nothing seems to be released . I can't see the point of ATI or nVIDIA in 
  denying wide-access to their specs. That's way beyond the grasp of my 
small intellect.

Vincent