Did I miss anything?
Perhaps just one more point. You can not expect to take a video driver for X and simply compile it for Picasso96. Putting aside the differences in the platforms (X86 vs PPC), the way these two graphics systems work with the drivers is completely different and not really compatible. The only thing the X drivers might be useful for is as a reference if you'd like to see how /they/ actually did something in particular, assuming that the X driver actually has the need for that piece of functionality. "Porting" of a hardware driver is really not an option.
In our case, the stuff in the X driver is the easy part, the early initialization of the hardware was the more difficult -- and as mentioned, the X driver has no need to do this early init. Even ATI seemed surprised that anyone would actually attempt to initialize the hardware manually rather than "letting the BIOS do it", which of course was not an option.
