From owner-freebsd-multimedia  Mon Aug  2 15:51:10 1999
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From: Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 3D board for XFree86 GLX - Please recommend
To: van.woerkom@netcologne.de, dfr@nlsystems.com
In-Reply-To: Marc van Woerkom's message of Tue, 3 Aug 1999 00:36:59 +0200 (CEST)
Organization: just say no
Cc: aa8vb@ipass.net, van.woerkom@netcologne.de,
	multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
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> I understand that the PCI bus specs are CPU independent, but what is with 
> the BIOS on a PCI card, isn't that written in x86 code? 

Of course, not all cards have any BIOS.  And some which do come in
different versions with different firmware.  I have seen Adaptec PCI
SCSI cards with Sparc "open boot" roms.  Since real operating systems
(tm) don't use the BIOS except during boot, this only matters for
controllers for bootable devices.

As to what happens if you use a card with the wrong BIOS, I don't know.
"No BIOS found, insert ROM to continue", perhaps.

-- Richard


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