From: Geert Uytterhoeven <Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be>
  To  : ggi-develop <ggi-develop@eskimo.com>
  Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 19:46:03 +0200 (CEST)

Re: porting openfirmware

On Wed, 9 Sep 1998, James A Simmons wrote:
> Hi. I have been looking at the openfirm code and tring to figure on how to
> put it into kgicon. Here is a suggestion. How about creating a bus_detect 
> subroutine into fbcon-kgi.c. The reason for puting it into fbcon-kgi.c is
> because I see fbcon-kgi.c as the os wrapper to the OS independent kgi
> drivers. Also using a .h file to define very possible OS way of calling
> the PCI bus would be awful.

Aha, finally I start to understand what you want to do: create a GGI driver for
offb, right?

Well, it doesn't make much sense. Offb is rather small (especially if I ever
find time to let all frame buffer devices use fbgen.c :-) and just provides a
dumb frame buffer. No mode switching, no color map setting (ATI colormap code
is a hack).

All video hardware can better be detected using PCI probing. The reasons that
atyfb is invoked by offb are:

  - the old PowerMac driver did that (historical reason)
  - it's simpler to provide for the fallback that offb really is if no
    supported video boards are detected

Greetings,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven                     Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be
Wavelets, Linux/{m68k~Amiga,PPC~CHRP}  http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/
Department of Computer Science -- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven -- Belgium