Re: Using a second display adapter



Digby Tarvin wrote:
I am thinkng of adding a second display adapter to experiment with. I'm not
really interested in dual head X (I'd use single dual head
adapter for that). I am more interested in having some display hardware that I can experiment with without effecting my console/X display.

Can anyone explain what happens hardware wise when a second adapter is
present? For example, adding a PCI adapter to a system that already
has an AGP card.

I assume that video memory for more advanced modes will be mapped to unique addresses by the PCI magic, but arn't the legacy modes like
CGA etc tied down to fixed addresses (eg SVGA tex mode to segment b000h)?
Is it possible to have have two text mode displays simultaneously?


That was possible AFAIK only with the matrox driver and the matrox G440/G550 dual head cards: both heads could show VT's.

Hugo



The sort of thing I would like to experiment with is having a 'diagnostic'
screen which the kernel can write a message to in real time by just
writing ascii to a memory address.

Perhaps it is something I can do without a custom driver using the
framebuffer interface? Except I don't necessarily want the complexity/
overheads of rendering fonts. Can I have a text mode frame buffer?

Anyway, the current adapter in this system is a AGP nVidia:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV25 [GeForce4 Ti 4200] (rev a3) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 137
Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
Memory at f0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
Memory at f4880000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=512K]
Expansion ROM at feae0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [44] AGP version 2.0

Any reccomendations on a goood card adapter to look for for this? The main
thing is probably a clean and simple hardware interface, and good open
source friendly documentation for driver writers. Doesn't need to be
state of the art - Something I can find cheaply on eBay (along with a
1280x1024 LCD display) would probably suffice.



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



Relevant Pages

  • Using a second display adapter
    ... I am thinkng of adding a second display adapter to experiment with. ... really interested in dual head X (I'd use single dual head ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Display Properties will not apply settingsNVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 6
    ... my settings in display properties resets to ... apply and restart and they reset to the above. ... The correct monitor and Adapter are selected. ... I ran a update search for each and it says I have the latest driver version. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Dave the Barbarian, a call to arms
    ... AdapterName "Microfield T8/2 High Resolution Graphics Controller" ... capturing the VGA video data and expanding it to a full screen display. ... Prompt "Interrupt Level" ... "To configure this adapter you must choose the Interrupt Level. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware)
  • Re: Installation instructions for Firefox somewhere?
    ... > commands from the SCSI adapter. ... > target shuts down and goes out of sync with the other initiators and ... The hardware was the same, and the long delay produced ... Or perhaps FreeBSD doesn't understand that this particular SCSI ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: Anthonys drive issues.Re: ssh password delay
    ... What makes it a _bug_? ... or approached the hardware in a way that made the modifications ... > at work which has a modded microcode in an Adaptec 2940U adapter card ... > spew errors) This is the same scsi chipset as Anthonys Vectra. ...
    (freebsd-questions)