Distribution: Gentoo Hardware Environment: Alphaserver DS20L, Radeon X1550 PCI Problem Description: Access to the VGA BIOS ROM on my Alphaserver DS20L with a Radeon X1550 PCI does not work. The ROM located at /sys/bus/pci/devices/<pciid>/rom is blank. Before starting X, I issue the following commands from the said directory. echo 1 > enable echo 1 > rom rom is empty at this point, which causes X to fail to load when started. See FreeDesktop bug 15699 for X logs using radeon and radeonhd drivers. Only after 'priming' the rom file will X (with radeonhd) load correctly. To prime it, I issue 'cat rom > /dev/null'.
Created attachment 16076 [details] kernel config
I believe this bug is a symptom of the same problem as in bug 10893. Please reassign to the appropriate place.
AFAIK you shouldn't need to do the "echo 1 > enable"; the X driver should take care of that for you (though maybe some versions of libpciaccess don't?). The fact that you have to read it fully before it becomes available is weird though, alpha must handle the resources required by drivers/pci/rom.c differently than other platforms...
> AFAIK you shouldn't need to do the "echo 1 > enable"; the X driver should > take > care of that for you (though maybe some versions of libpciaccess don't?). > The > fact that you have to read it fully before it becomes available is weird > though, alpha must handle the resources required by drivers/pci/rom.c > differently than other platforms... Yes, it is very strange. Also, the version of X I'm using doesn't use libpciaccess (per bug 10893). Oddly enough, when I put a Radeon 9100 in, I don't experience any of these problems and don't have to jump through hoops to make X start up. It only happens on my X1550.