multi head madness

[Jesse Barnes]

On Tuesday, October 30, 2007 6:53 pm Alex Deucher wrote:
> On 10/29/07, Carl Karsten <carl at personnelware.com> wrote:
> > I have noticed that sometimes my secondary heads have a bit of text
> > identifying the video card they are connected to, like "ATI Rage128
> > PRO GL PCI - P/N 113-74403-101" and "Monster Fusion Ver 1.20b4002
> > Diamond Multimedia Sytstems, Inc; Video Memory 16MB"  This comes in
> > handy, but I don't have a good way of invoking it.  I generally see
> > it as X is starting up, and once the Screens get used the message
> > is gone.
> >
> > What would it take to have a CLI tool that would display those
> > strings and leave them up?
> >
> > It might also be hand to be able to pass a string to be displayed
> > too, like "Screen 2"
>
> This is an artifact of the posting process.  It's displayed as part
> of the card's init sequence.  Some cards do it some don't.  there's
> not a way that I'm aware of to display it at will.

One thing I used to do when posting cards by hand is mapping their VRAM 
base to some bogus scratch space.  That allows the POST code to write 
its stuff without it actually being displayed.  This may only work with 
some VBIOSes though.

Jesse