2003-Oct-25

Alliance Semiconductor Corporation ProVideo 6424 (under X) comes up with garbage at top of screen and is unusable. This is: Linux 2.4.22 with SMP and XFree86 4.3.0. And my /proc/pci contains:

Bus  0, device  15, function  0:
VGA compatible controller: Alliance Semiconductor Corporation ProVideo 6424 (rev 0).
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe4000000 [0xe4ffffff].
I/O at 0xc800 [0xc80f].

"XFree86 -configure" also detects it as the apm(4) driver. But that man page for Alliance Promotion video driver doesn't specifically mention "6424".

Identifier  "Card0"
Driver      "apm"
VendorName  "Alliance Semiconductor Corporation"
BoardName   "ProVideo 6424"
BusID       "PCI:0:15:0"

And X output:

(II) APM: driver for the Alliance chipsets: AP6422, AT24, AT3D
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 00:0f:0
(--) Chipset AT24 found
...
(II) APM(0): vgaHWGetIOBase: hwp->IOBase is 0x03d0, hwp->PIOOffset is
0x0000
(==) APM(0): Depth 8, (==) framebuffer bpp 8
(==) APM(0): Default visual is PseudoColor
(==) APM(0): Using SW cursor
(--) APM(0): Chipset: "AT24"
(--) APM(0): Linear framebuffer at 0xE4000000

I also tried 6422 and at3d chipsets. This is a Diamond Stealth Video 2500 card. Some postings say it doesn't work. I got it to partially work (but a lot of dots and noise and very slow) with NoAccell option. It also works about the same using vesa driver. The vga driver only works in 320x200 mode -- but very clear.

Also, XFree86 start up (even using vesa) says:

(WW) Open APM failed (/dev/apm_bios) (No such device)

I have /dev/apm_bios correct, but since this is SMP, the kernel says:

apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x07 (Driver version 1.16)
apm: disabled - APM is not SMP safe.

Later: I realized this 2MB Diamond Stealth Video 2500 is junk (and is probably over seven years old). So it was replaced.

Made and imported linux-kbd ("kbd") to pkgsrc-wip.