On Friday, July 30, 2004 9:53 am, Jon Smirl wrote:
> We talked at OLS about exposing adapter ROMs via sysfs. I have some
> time to work on this but I'm not sure about the right places to hook
> into the kernel.

How about this patch?

> The first problem is recording the boot video device. This is needed
> for laptops that compress their video and system ROMs together into a
> single ROM. When sysfs exposes the ROM for these adapters it needs to
> know the boot video device so that it can return the ROM image at
> C000:0 instead of trying to find an actual ROM. What is the right
> kernel structure for recording the boot video device? Where should this
> code live? It is probably x86 specific but have non-x86 laptops done
> the same trick?

If we have the pci quirks stuff fill in pci_dev->resource[PCI_ROM_RESOURCE] 
with the right addresses, we should be ok.

> What about ISA support. Should we make an attempt to return ROM
> contents from ISA cards?

That's probably more trouble than it's worth, but if someone really wants it 
they could always code it up.

> Note that not just video cards can have ROMs. Disk adapters commonly
> have them too. We probably want to expose these ROMs too.
>
> Do we want to expose the system ROM via sysfs? Where should it appear?
>
> Some Radeon cards have a bug where they forgot to clear a latch which
> makes the ROMs visible. Where should a fix for things like this go? I
> can put it in the radeon driver but if you try to read the ROM before
> the driver is loaded, the ROM won't be visible.

Jesse