Baby Steps - A Skeleton Picasso96 Graphics Driver

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Since receiving the developer material for Picasso96, I have built a skeleton driver: RadeonHD.chip. At present this skeleton does absolutely nothing; it fails on initialization of the graphics card. However, the system will correctly identify a Radeon HD graphics card and load the RadeonHD.chip driver. This is, thus, a small baby step toward a basic frame-buffer driver (which will be the first milestone). 

This post is the first in a series marking minor steps in the driver development. I have decided to post information about minor changes to this log so that those who are interested can see the software development process in more detail. Essentially, software is built in small incremental steps; it does not pay to try to do everything at once because that will likely cause a mess of buggy code. I will have to be careful with these updates so as to avoid posting information covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that I signed. In particular, any debug logs that are posted will likely be edited to remove information about Picasso96 internals.

Comments (1) | 8 October 2008