> Andres Salomon wrote:
> > This is what I was told (it was only needed for secondary video
> > devices). From that, I would expect that all video devices would
> > need it, just in case they happened to be the second card. Am I
> > missing some subtlety in some of the video driers/chipsets that
> > wouldn't allow them to be used as a second video device (therefore
> > not requiring pci_enable_device)?
>
> They do need pci_enable_device, both primary and secondary displays.
> For the primary display its safe to call pci_enable_device. For
> secondary displays, you have to first disable I/O decoding for all VGA
> devices before you can enable a secondary display. You don't want more
> than one device decoding the legacy VGA region at any one time.
>
> Some cards have the capability to relocate the VGA region, which is
> nice. The bigger problem is initializing secondary displays; every
> video card has a proprietary video BIOS initialization sequence that is
> run by main BIOS on startup. You can either duplicate this sequence
> with C code, which is sometimes difficult due to lack of docs or variety
> of boards, or you can execute the video BIOS with an x86 emulator.
Note: With linuxBIOS (and some other embedded linux setups) even a
primary display doesn't get initialized until you start linux so if
you can properly initialize your display please do it.
Eric
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