ATI drivers and Mac Power PC

[Alex Deucher]

On Jan 20, 2008 7:07 AM, Robin H. Johnson <robbat2 at gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 11:39:56PM -0800, R.C. wrote:
> > Does anyone know of a way to run Linux on this machine with this card?
> At the low-level, there are some glitches. See if you can access the PCI
> ROM on your card at all. In the case of the X1900 in my Quad G5, the
> entire PCI ROM shows up as empty, so all of the AtomBIOS initialization
> code fails in both the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers.
>
> I last tested about 2 weeks ago, I'm not sure if any progress has been
> made in on either set of drivers since then. radeonhd used to have a
> function specifically for reading the ROM from the non-primary card,
> that probably needs a bit more TLC (and help from ATI), but should then
> manage to extract the ROM.

There are several issues:

1. Mac cards don't have ATOM bios, they have some mac specific rom, so
they will likely never work with the current drivers.
2. the ATOM parser isn't currently big endian aware

Once the ATOM parser is fixed for big endian any PC card should work.

Alex