From: teunis <teunis@computersupportcentre.com>
  To  : andreas.beck@ggi-project.org
  Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1998 21:48:00 -0700 (MST)

Re: kgicon on PPC (yes, I finally tried)

On Sun, 6 Sep 1998 becka@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de wrote:

> 
> > I finally tried kgicon on my CHRP box with S3 Vision968 
> > (2 MB VRAM, IBM RGB526 RAMDAC).
> 
> Oh - good ... finally some real portability tests !

Yep *heh*  Watching carefully to see how this progresses....

[clip]

> > But insmod kgicon.o gave me this error:
> > | S3 86c964/86c968 chipset driver rev $Revision: 1.3 $
> > | error: failed to detect Vision964 or Vision968.
> > | error: kgim_chipset_init failed
> > | error: init_kgi() failed, bailing out....
> > 
> > Any clues?
> 
> Try increasing the debuglevel in the chipset driver. This should give more
> detailed information on what fails.

If it's anything like the Trio64V+/ViRGE drivers, it's because the driver
-requires- the card to be active on standard VGA IO/memory while it's
initializing.

This is a -serious- error in driver design - especially on non-intel
platforms such as PPC which don't -have- IO/ports!  Just MMIO.

This is one of the thing's I'm trying to figure out how to fix in the
ViRGE driver.  (AFAIK the Trio64V+ is a lost cause unless it's already
active before initialization... the Trio64V+ requires a VGA port-probe to
activate (afaik) if it's a secondary display and this just isn't possible
on PowerPC - or when your primary videocard doesn't share nicely [ie: VGA
KGIcon driver])

G'day, eh? :)
	- Teunis