Boot w/ VGA console - PCI nvidia

[Bill Farrow]

Russell McGuire wrote:
> Next I have plugged in a nVidia GeForce FX5200 PCI card,
> and compiled in the nvidafb driver.
>
> I can see clearly the PCI card is being detected and the
> nvidiafb driver is being registerd, it can even detect
> the monitor I have connected.
>
> However, when I enabled the kernel to use the framer
> buffer console, by compiling in that feature, it just 
> 'seems' to hang after the console_init call.

Hi Russ,
I got to the same point last year with an ATI PCI card on a MPC8560
system. At this stage, I believe that to get the card displaying
graphics you will need to run the card's Video BIOS to initialise the
card correctly.

I'm guessing that you are running a PPC cpu :-) and that the FX5200 is a
consumer x86 graphics card.  If so, the Video BIOS will be x86
instructions and you will need to run it with an emulator.

A company called SciTech is maintaining an x86emu project for doing
this:
  http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/dev/x86_emulator.html

I believe that Xorg also has a x86emu module, so I was going to see if I
could get an Xorg installation going and let it do it's magic.

For us, getting Xorg running would prove the graphics capability of our
platform and we can start writing a GUI.  Then it would be just a matter
of getting uBoot to display something during boot to keep the customers
happy...


Bill