ATI drivers and Mac Power PC

[Alex Deucher]

On Jan 22, 2008 5:37 AM, Michel Dänzer <michel at tungstengraphics.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 18:12 -0800, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 02:15:29PM -0500, Alex Deucher wrote:
> > > 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.
> > Notice per my previous posts, that all means of reading any ROM on the
> > X1900 have turned up only nulls or no data. This includes the sysfs rom
> > node as well as the radeonhd functionality to read ROMs thus far.
> >
> > It's the fact that it reads back as all zeros that concerns me - not
> > even getting back a copy of the OFW-specific ROM.
>
> Again, the driver currently can't get any useful information from OFW
> ROMs anyway.
>
>
> > > 2. the ATOM parser isn't currently big endian aware
> > > Once the ATOM parser is fixed for big endian any PC card should work.
> > The secondary card in my G5 is an X700, so when you think you have the
> > endian parsing fixed, give me a shout, and I can test.
>
> I didn't think X700s had ATOM BIOS ROMs either, do they?

yeah x700s did. r4xx were the first to get ATOM bioses.

Alex