From: becka@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 22:01:24 +0200 (MEST)

Re: Multiple ATI Video Cards

Hi !

> I have installed two ATI Mach64 Rage II C video cards on a 686 machine
> running Redhat Linux 5.2 with kernel 2.2.7.  The kernel was compiled with
> framebuffer and ATI options enabled.  Video card 0 works fine and seems 
> completely normal, but card 1 just shows a screen full of about 50 vertical
> green lines.  I have swapped monitors, and swapped cards, and the anomoly
> stays with card 1.  

It is bound to the _card_ right ? Not to the PCI-slot it is in - or ?

Usually Motherboards implement some kind of "leftmost slot" logic or similar
to decide which card gets woken up by the BIOS.

If it is bound to the _card_, that would speak against me theory.

> 'fbset -fb /dev/fb1 -v "800x600-60"' gave:
> (And the number of vertical green lines increased, at smaller spacing.)

Sounds like a missing-BIOS-init problem.

> NOTE that geometry read from fb1 is incorrect; I've tried this over
> and over, and it stays at 640x480, although the screen displays the
> 800x600 pattern.

Weird.

> GGI's demonstration programs run fine on fb0.  
> With GGI_DISPLAY=fbdev:/dev/fb1, the GGI demos do not interefere at all
> with the fb0 display, but their output on the fb1 monitor is barely
> recognizeable.  Afterwards, the fb1 display returns to vertical green lines.

Could you describe barely recognizeable ?

> Is there some startup or reset or MMIO configuration utility I haven't found?

I suppose the bios of the card does some required initialization.

IF the whole register range of the ATI cards is known, together with the
"lock" registers that might be needed to access it all, you should be able
to retrieve a complete register dump from the correctly initialized card
and dump it into the second card.

If you have some programming skills, looking into the ATI driver sources
might help. If not, maybe we can find someone with the same problem or
living close enough to you, to come over for a beer and some hacking :-).

Anybody here ?

CU, Andy

-- 
= Andreas Beck                    |  Email :  <andreas.beck@ggi-project.org> =