From: James A Simmons <jsimmons@acsu.buffalo.edu>
  To  : Geert Uytterhoeven <Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be>
  Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1998 07:23:06 -0400 (EDT)

Re: porting openfirmware

On Wed, 9 Sep 1998, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

> 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

Ture but what about boards that are based on openfirware and not PCI like
the platinum board. By the way explain the ofonly flag.