From: Matan Ziv-Av (matan@svgalib.org)
Date: Sun 27 Aug 2000 - 18:19:44 IDT
On Sun, 27 Aug 2000 alexwen@21cn.com wrote: > Matan, > Could you put this to more detail: > In order to use the secondary card it needs to be initialized by it > own bios. If your BIOS does not initialize all video cards (most > don't), the program to do it is in the x86emu package. Get > x86emu-0.6.tar.gz from scitechsoft, compile and run the program > vbios.x86emu. If the video card is disabled by the pci, use setpci > -s xx:yy.z COMMAND=3 to enable it. Then add the option secondary to > the config file, and use chipset and pcistart statements to make > suresvgalib uses the right card. > When I use setpci like that, my machine crashes. > I think dual monitor is very useful. Hope you can make it perfect! > Thanks. First: only nvidia, 3dfx, sis and i740 cards can be secondary cards, (though the primary can be anything, including vesa). Second: as far as I can understand, once both cards are enabled, there ought to be a resource contention (in hardware) between the cards for the vga regions (IO 0x3c0-0x3df and MEM 0xa0000-0xbffff). I don't know how it is supposed to be solved, but in practice, if I ignore it in my system, it just works. If anybody else has successfully run svgalib on a secondary card, please tell me, and if you had to do something different from what I did, a detailed report to the list might help others. Here's my setup: I have two vga cards: AGP (1:0.0) nVidia TNT2 and (PCI0:0f.0) Riva128. The AGP card is the primary (in the BIOS option "initialize AGP card first" is selected). My boot sequence includes the following code to initialize the secondary card: /usr/local/sbin/vbios.x86emu /usr/local/sbin/vga_reset /sbin/setpci -s 00:0f.0 COMMAND=2 the vbios.x86emu is the same as distributed in x86emu-0.6 except that in debug.h the line #define CONFIG_ACTIVE_DEVICE 1 is replaced by #define CONFIG_ACTIVE_DEVICE 0 (so that the active device is not initialized by x86emu). the setpci line enables memory access (of the drivers supporting secondary card, nv3 and i740 use only memory mapped IO, sis and banshee need I/O access as well, so you need COMMAND=3). The COMMAND register might have other bits set, so you might try to see its value first, and then set the 0,1 bits. I have two config files in /etc/vga: libvga.config.0 - for the scondary card: novccontrol secondary include /etc/vga/libvga.config.common HorizSync 30 54 VertRefresh 40 120 The novccontrol and secondary options are necessary for a secondary card. The include statement is for a card with common configurations - mouse, keyboard, etc. libvga.config.1 - for the primary: PCIStart 1 0 include /etc/vga/libvga.config.common HorizSync 30 115 VertRefresh 40 160 The pcistart option is necessary to make sure that svgalib skips the first card (in PCI order), and so finds the AGP card. to run a program on the primary card, in the usual way, I do export SVGALIB_CARD=1 /svgalib/demos/vgatest to run a program on the secondary card: export SVGALIB_CARD=0 /svgalib/demos/vgatest There are a few differences for a program running on secondary card: - The program is not aware of VC switches, so you can switch to another console, and the program will still run (and display). - The program can't event system (mouse or raw keyboard). - Standard VGA modes and paged memory modes might have problems. What this limitations mean is that usual svgalib program might not be useful for a secondary card. I use the secondary display for watching TV, movies and slideshows. Eye candy programs (such as synaesthesia) might also work, after a few changes, but interactive programs (zgv, games) are unusable right now. I intend to add support for Vojtech Pavlik's input event system to svgalib-2.0, so that interactive program will be usable as well. -- Matan Ziv-Av. matan@svgalib.org
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