Need Help with ATI Graphic Card bring up

[Alex Deucher]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Bizhan Gholikhamseh (bgholikh)
<bgholikh at cisco.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Alex Deucher [mailto:alexdeucher at gmail.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 10:34 AM
>> To: Bizhan Gholikhamseh (bgholikh)
>> Cc: xorg-driver-ati at lists.x.org
>> Subject: Re: Need Help with ATI Graphic Card bring up
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 6:56 AM, Bizhan Gholikhamseh
>> (bgholikh) <bgholikh at cisco.com> wrote:
>> > Hi All,
>> > I have an embedded custom board PowerPC board (Freescale).
>> > I have booted Debian 4.0 (etch) on the system running on
>> Linux kernel
>> > 2.6.25.
>> > I have an ATI graphic card Radeon 9250 PCI card. USB mouse
>> and Keyboard.
>> > I have console access to the system (serial connection).
>> > I would like to get the graphic card to function in my environment.
>> > However,  I get
>> > lot us of error when I ran "startx" command.
>> > I am using generic Linux image compiled for PowerPC, I am not sure
>> > where the problem is.
>> > I have attached the log files for
>> > xorg.conf and xorg.0.log. Please help me, I am stuck on
>> this for last
>> > 2 weeks.
>>
>> You need to post the card for it to be usable.  The video
>> bios normally does this at boot to initialize the video card.
>>  On non-x86 platforms you'll need either support for posting
>> x86 video roms in your boot loader or you'll have to make
>> sure the x86 emulator in the xserver is working on your
>> platform and use it to post the card.  On ati cards, you can
>> also use tables in the bios to manually initialize the cards.
>>  There is code to do this for your card in more recent
>> versions of the radeon driver, but it's not well tested and
>> is disabled by default.
>>
> Are there any PCI card that I can purchase that does not requires Bios
> setup and xorg has driver for it, so I can move on? Any Mac graphic
> card?

Mac cards have an open firmware bios which may or may not be useful on
your platform.  As far as I know all graphics cards require proper
initialization.  You're best bet is to get a r5xx based radeon chip
(x1330, x1600, x1900, etc.).  radeon chips with atombios have a
special command table in the bios to initialize the asic without the
need of an x86 bios.  You will need to grab the radeon driver from git
however as only it has the changes needed to deal with bigendian in
the atombios interpreter.  This has only been tested on ppc,  but mips
should work similarly.

Alex