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The least desirable option is for the PCI card to include an expansion ROM with no FCode, or no expansion ROM at all. At system startup time, the card is recognized and address space is allocated for the device, but no peripheral initialization or driver code is loaded. The operating system must load driver code from a mass storage device before the card can be used. Most importantly, there is no distinct name property for the device; this makes unambiguous run-time driver matching less certain when several card manufacturers support the same device. Driver matching issues are discussed in Matching Drivers With Devices.
Because future Macintosh computers may run a variety of operating systems, full Open Firmware support is particularly important for PCI-based graphics devices. If a PCI device is the user's only display, it should operate during the Open Firmware startup process and should deliver plug-and-play performance with the user's choice of operating system. The Open Firmware driver does not need to be sophisticated; if it can initialize the device to 8-bit color mode and publish the frame buffer address, Open Firmware in the bootROM will control the device and perform the required image rendering.