Hello,

> GPUs need some code that runs on the main CPU to initialize them,
> once, right after they get power.  This code is generally _not_
> included in the ``native'' drivers in Windows EnTee or XFree86 or
> matroxfb or whatever.  It doesn't need to be, because the BIOS or OF
> does it once at power-on, and it never needs to be done again.
Huh? What the hell are you talking about? What I meant were simple 
framebuffer devices  with - maybe - some native acceleration for 
scrolling which don't depend on OF to do everything right (like setting 
some useful video mode which OF sometimes fails to do), nothing fancy. 
Things like a Millennium I - OF text mode doesn't work for some reason 
( at least not for me ) but a NetBSD console on it would be nice. So 
all I want is a device driver attached to it that offers some way to 
map registers ( IO or memory based ) and framebuffer somewhere. Access 
to IO space is machine dependent so we need some abstraction -> a 
driver.

> so, to do what you want, you need PeeCee video cards and an 8086
> emulator to run the code on their BIOS chip.
Nope. You're way off. ( although there are OpenFirmware machines with 
basic 486 emulation in ROM for generic PCI VGA support, but they're 
pretty rare )

> This information is based on a collection of scant facts and
> assumptions, so I only hope it's correct.
You got me totally wrong.

> anyway, if anyone's used XFree86's int10 support to get a PeeCee video
> card working in a Mac (albeit only under X, not wscons, of course),
> I'd be interested to hear about it.  I dunno if it's even
> theoretically possible.
Calm down, no one wants to do such a thing. When I wrote 'PCish' I 
meant 'VGA-quirk-compatible' - read: needs VGA IO registers mapped 
somewhere to be useful. Accessing them is quite a different thing on 
PCs and Macs, some generalization here should be useful since virtually 
all affordable PCI or AGP graphics cards - no matter if they're for 
PCs, Macs or whatever - are in fact more or less VGA compatible and 
many XFree86 drivers use the vgahw module to access VGA registers which 
fails horribly on anything that's not x86. All I want is to give XFree 
an easy way to use these cards on non-x86 machines.

have fun
Michael