David Hopper <dhop@nwlink.com> writes:

> You're posing a major architectural change to XFree86 itself, and
> based upon the glacial speed of that codebase, it might be easier to
> just put a propeller-beanie on the brain-damaged approach and call it
> 'good'.
> 
> Besides, don't all these different chipsets need to map video memory,
> texture memory, and address spaces differently?  Making a unified "ask
> the console" device would mean creating kernel module drivers for
> individual chipsets, and is the main reason why fb-dev in Linux is in
> such a quagmire...

I don't think Ross was suggesting going that far, but rather just "ask
the console what PCI device to use" instead of scanning. We've already
got some hooks in XFree86 to use our PCI interface code, so this would
be a moderately localized change.

For that matter, XF86Config already has a way to directly specify a
device's location on a bus with the BusID flag; can you try using that
instead of letting the server scan? (It's not immediately clear if the
existing syntax for BusID is really general enough for a system with
more than one PCI hierarchy, like your system)

        - Nathan