Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 13:23:37 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: lcozzens@gateway.us.sidwell.edu (Lisa Cozzens) Cc: freebsd-questions@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Problems with Cirrus card Message-ID: <199508150353.NAA23703@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSD/.3.91.950814163546.18145D-100000@gateway.us.sidwell.edu> from "Lisa Cozzens" at Aug 14, 95 04:59:17 pm
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Lisa Cozzens stands accused of saying: > > I'm trying to help a colleague set up FreeBSD on a Pentium-90 with 50 > megs of RAM. We're having problems getting the Cirrus video card to work > properly. When FreeBSD boots with the card in, the boot prompt (whereyou > can specify which kernel/hard drive to boot from) comes up fine, but then > weird things start happening. It seems like every second or third > character is replaced by a space, so screens look something like this: > f a d s c e h a > etc., etc. When we put in a different card (we've tried a Trident 8900 > and a "Windows Accelerator" card, model #1580HC, both with 1MB of > memory), everything works fine. Ok; start by taking the machine back to 16M of memory - some of those Cirrus cards have a linear memory aperture over the 16M mark, and it's possible this is interfering with the card. It's also possible that your VLB setup is too fast - if you can, add a waitstate to the bus. (It may be a jumper marked <33MHz/>33MHz...) > We tried booting with the -c flag, and we got into the config program > just fine. Then, when we typed ?, the text was illegible (like the text > above) but the config> prompt was perfectly legible, as was anything we > typed at it. Because the text was illegible, we couldn't get any > information from that program. The text above comes out rather fast, so I suspect you may have a timing thing happening - it's hard to tell. > The Cirrus card is labeled CL-GD5426-80QC-A and the manual says that it's > a VL Bus card based on the Cirrus Logic GD5426 graphic VGA chip (thus the > labeling :). The card is using IRQ 9; nothing in the startup messages > mentions any conflict with that IRQ. The card has 1 MB of memory. You'll want to disable IRQ 9 - I don't think this is your problem, but if you have anything else in the system on either IRQ2 or IRQ9 you're guaranteed grief from it. > I checked the handbook, the faq, and systems.faq but I couldn't find any > mention of Cirrus cards. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place(s)? The 5426 is a really cheezy card - if you're planning on doing X on this machine, do yourself a favour and buy an S3-based card like a Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM (Make sure it's an -864, not a -764) or a number-9 or similar. > Lisa Cozzens -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] My car has "demand start" - Terry Lambert [[
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