Dump Video BIOS at Haiku OS - how to do it?

#1

While trying to dump Video BIOS of my GPU at Linux - I always get Input/Output error.
Would like to try Haiku OS. Please tell, how to dump Video BIOS of my GPU at Haiku OS?

#2

What’s the point exactly?

#3

There are a lot of possible reasons for dumping Video BIOS :
1) Mod it to improve the performance of GPU
2) Use it together with coreboot open source BIOS
3) Just the backup purposes

I already know how it could be done with Windows - not trivial but doable, see the last post at

However I wanted to do it at open source OS such as Linux or Haiku.
Haiku OS is different to Linux, so it may work where the Linux is failing!
If you know any way of dumping Video BIOS at Haiku, please tell us

#4

My radeon_hd driver already does this. :slight_smile: Since Radeon HD cards are AtomBIOS, having the bios is handy for troubleshooting.

http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/tree/src/add-ons/accelerants/radeon_hd/bios.cpp#n187

You have to enable tracing in that bios.cpp though and rebuild the accelerant. Turns out dumping a few megs of BIOS on every boot is bad for performance :slight_smile:

The bios dumping could be exposed from the driver at some point theoretically.