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Re: [colorforth] PCI chipset bug causes display failure...


Thank you, Howerd, for reposting this, at the very least, and for the
PCI test. Will try this out soonest.

I'm on the HP/Compaq with intel P4 and have had trouble with
colorforths starting or saving on this machine.

I will do the test immediatly.
I assume that your site has the new PCI.exe in your cfdos#.exe disptribution. 

Here's to the test.  E-mail results here after completion.

Ray.

On 7/9/05, howerd.oakford <howerd.oakford@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> From comp.lang.forth, in case you missed it :
> 
> From: "Howerd" <howerdo@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
> Subject: Re: ANN: PCIdev - PCI device viewer ( new and improved )
> Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2005 17:35:36 -0700
> 
> Hi Albert & John,
> 
> THANK YOU BOTH!!! I took a look at the Linux sources and...
> 
> Albert: you are mostly right - lspci uses hardware access, but - from
> i386-ports.c ( used in the libpci library ) :
> 
> /*
>  * Before we decide to use direct hardware access mechanisms, we try to
> do some
>  * trivial checks to ensure it at least _seems_ to be working -- we
> just test
>  * whether bus 00 contains a host bridge (this is similar to checking
>  * techniques used in XFree86, but ours should be more reliable since
> we
>  * attempt to make use of direct access hints provided by the PCI
> BIOS).
>  *
>  * This should be close to trivial, but it isn't, because there are
> buggy
>  * chipsets (yes, you guessed it, by Intel and Compaq) that have no
> class ID.
>  */
> 
> The last two lines are critical : could this be why the versions of
> colorForth that scan the PCI bus for the video card's RAM address don't
> work??? I believe the code scans for a class code 3 ( Display ).
> 
> So, if any of you have a PC that refuses to run colorForth, could you
> please run PCIdev on it and report whether it finds any Class 3
> devices...
> Somehow the PCI BIOS must know about these brain-dead chips.
> 
> From Chuck's original gen.asm :
> 
> dev: mov  EAX, 80001008h ; Find display, start at device 2
>     mov  ECX, 31-1 ; end with AGP: 10008, bus 1, dev 0
> @@:     DUP_
>         call north
>         and  EAX, 0ff000000h
>         cmp  EAX, 3000000h
>         DROP
>         jz   @f
>         add  EAX, 800h
>         next @b
> @@: ret
> 
> This must also mean that our Linux friends have mastered the art of
> accessing the PCI BIOS from protected mode. It looks like I will have
> to dig into the sources some more...
> 
> I am amazed that PCI chipset manufacturers could get the first, most
> fundamental ID wrong. Thanks again to the Linux developers 8^)
> 
> *!*"*£% !*"&£(^!
> 
> Howerd  8^o
> 
> 
> Albert van der Horst wrote:
> > In article <1120893158.735559.13860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> > Howerd <howerdo@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >Hi John,
> > >
> > >John Passaniti wrote:
> > >> Howerd wrote:
> > >> > Announcing PCI.exe and PCI.f, a PCI viewer program, supplied as ANS
> > >> > Forth source and a turnkeyed application :
> > >
> > >> Although I'm not suggesting your effort was wasted, an alternative way
> > >> to do the same thing would be to use one of the run-from-CD Linux
> > >> distributions and poke around under /proc and use utilities like lspci.
> > >Thanks for the pointer - yet another reason to thank those Linux
> > >lads...
> > >
> > >PCIdev uses direct hardware access to display information about PCI
> > >devices - as far as I know all similar apps use BIOS calls.
> > >This is, of course,
> 
>  so that I can port it to colorForth...
> >
> > Linux speedily passes into protected mode, so I severely doubt that
> > much BIOS-calling is going on.
> >
> > >
> > >Regards
> > >
> > >Howerd  8^)
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > --
> > Albert van der Horst,Oranjestr 8,3511 RA UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
> > Economic growth -- like all pyramid schemes -- ultimately falters.
> > albert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
> 
> 
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> 


-- 
Ray St. Marie
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