Re: Compiling 2.4.0 with ruby.

[James S. <jsi...@su...>]

> > Try the lastest CVS. It is fixed.
> OK. It is. Now I have this instead:
> 
> In file included from
> /SDA3/usr/src/linux_patched/include/linux/irq.h:57,

This is a problem with the standard kernel which our tree is against ;-(

> dummycon.c: At top level:
> dummycon.c:64: unknown field `con_switch' specified in initializer
> dummycon.c:65: duplicate initializer
> dummycon.c:65: (near initialization for `dummy_con.con_blank')
> dummycon.c:69: unknown field `con_scrolldelta' specified in initializer
> dummycon.c:69: duplicate initializer
> dummycon.c:69: (near initialization for `dummy_con.con_scroll')
> make[4]: *** [dummycon.o] Error 1

Fixed and commited.

> > Not yet. This requires rewriting the fbcon layer which I'm about to do.
> 
> So I can't run several vgacons on different graphics cards/chips yet
> either?

Well with vga ISA hardware it is much more difficult to do. Some cards
allowed for you to change the register space but very few allow you to
change the memory region that vga uses (a000). 

> Due to the bios restriction?

Most video cards depend on some code in their firmware to initialize their
hardware to run. This is why if you can't buy say a Voodoo video card for
the mac and plug it into a PC. Vice verse is also true. What is needed is
to figure out which registers the video card needs programmed that the
firware does. This would then allow the driver to be truly platform
independent. On PCs the BIOS is needed to intialize the video
card. Unfortunely they don't initialize more than one.

> > don't see multiple video cards so only the first one on the PCI bus gets
> > intialized :-(
> 
> So not yet. But would the bios still initialize all heads on a multihead
> card? No, I guess not, just the first. A job for linuxbios? :)

If you mean by multihead card a single video card that supports more than
one monitor than no. That would be up to the driver to program both heads.
You still need to initialze the card with the BIOS if you don't know what
regitser specs are needed to initialize the video card. A good example is
the matrox framebuffer driver for this which BTW is BIOS independent :-)