Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 30 Jul 2004 10:24:33 -0700 (PDT) | From | Jon Smirl <> | Subject | Re: Exposing ROM's though sysfs |
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--- Torrey Hoffman <thoffman@arnor.net> wrote: > This sounds interesting, but I'm curious... why? That is, what > problem are you solving by making ROMs exposed? > > Or is this just for fun? (That's a legitimate reason IMO...)
Secondary video cards need to have code in their ROMs run to reset them. When an x86 PC boots it only reset the primary video device, the secondary ones won't work until their ROMs are run.
Another group needing this is laptop suspend/resume. Some cards won't come back from suspend until their ROM is run to reinitialize them.
A third group is undocumented video hotware where the only way to set the screen mode is by calling INT10 in the video ROMs. (Intel i810,830,915 for example).
Small apps are attached to the hotplug events. These apps then use vm86 or emu86 to run the ROMs. emu86 is needed for ia64 or ppc when running x86 ROMs on them.
===== Jon Smirl jonsmirl@yahoo.com
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