Xorg, xf86EnableIO() and the VESA driver

[Jérémie Koenig]

2010/3/11 Jérémie Koenig <jk@jk.fr.eu.org>:
> By the way, some other problems I have (I will investigate those further):
>  * Using the VESA driver, the X server crashes with SIGILL. The
> backtrace shown suggests this happens in the int10 code.

The culprit is xf86EnableIO() in hw/xfree86/os-support/hurd/hurd_video.c:

Bool
xf86EnableIO()
{
    if (ioperm(0, 0x10000, 1)) {
        FatalError("xf86EnableIO: ioperm() failed (%s)\n", strerror(errno));
        return FALSE;
    }
    ioperm(0x40,4,0); /* trap access to the timer chip */
    ioperm(0x60,4,0); /* trap access to the keyboard controller */
    return TRUE;
}

Apparently the code in my card's BIOS needs access to both 0x40-0x43
and 0x60-0x63: if I reenable them manually from within gdb the vesa
driver works.

I'm not sure why those are disallowed in the first place (prevent
direct access to the keyboard by Xorg?) or what should be done.

-- 
Jérémie Koenig <jk@jk.fr.eu.org>
http://jk.fr.eu.org/