[syslinux] more on firmware loading need

[Ryan McDowell]

Axel and everyone

Your questions are valid. I had similar question when I bought these 
cards. These cards in particular have no rom chip on the pci card. If 
you plug these into a computer they do nothing until you load them with 
there firmware. When vt6410 are used on motherboards not as stand alone 
cards the bios has this firmware and loads it into the chip set on boot 
making them show up and function using the linux driver for via ide 
controllers. In the case of add on cards the bios usually doesn't have 
this firmware included. In win land the driver includes this firmware 
and loads it on initialazion of hardware. On linux we do this same sort 
of thing with wifi cards but i found no reference to using this for an 
ide controller. I only found reference to updating mainboard bios to 
include this firmware to be loaded. The particular board I have doesn't 
have enough space left to make this happen. I'm hoping to use syslinux 
to chain load the firmware loading then boot linux. I'm no expert at all 
of the options or possibilities that syslinux has. I'm hoping that this 
is possible. Or someone has another solution. I don't like scrapping 
hardware even if it cost very little. As for using kernel 2.6.22...I 
wish. At this point I'm trying to use dban with minimal rework time at 
this point that doesn't seem to be happening. He has a beta version 
which meet most of my requirements but wraps his initrd/root inside his 
kernel using lzma to compress/uncompress the whole thing. His 
kernel(2.6.20.7) should see the card but without the firmware no 
functionality. I was hoping to keep this project simple. Now it seems 
I'm going to recompile the whole thing to get/add the functions/features 
I need. I might as well do a fork of dban just to get it were I think it 
should be. I tried this card in my main desktop system which runs debian 
lenny standard kernel (2.6.21whatever) and it shows the card in lspci 
but doesn't create /proc/ide/hd* for any of the channels. I had known 
good hardrives plugged into the card at the time.

I'm sorry that this post has moved away from only syslinux specific help 
but I hope this backround helps other in understanding what I hope to 
complete. If syslinux can load firmware that would solve most of my 
issues at this point. Again any ideas would be great considering the 
stress I've created for myself.