On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 04:06:45PM +0200, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
No; a general VGA bios is a broken concept to begin with.
What you should know is that VGA is _not_ a standard, and one should never, ever try to change the mode without more detailed hw knowledge. It is only a standard through the int10 and vbe interfaces, where the manufacturers vga bios does all the vga and hw specific stuff for you.
What such a general bios should do is find out, one way or another, what mode has been set and how to stuff things into the framebuffer.
In this case: mode 3h: 80x25 with 8x16 fonts, with the framebuffer living at 0xB8000 and with vga standard cursor and fb offset handling.
So a general int10 bios should find this out and then claim to only support this and absolutely nothing else.
Everything else requires a whole bunch of hw specific code, and while you could spend the rest of your days porting graphics drivers from fb or X to this code, i think there are much better ways to spend ones time.
Luc Verhaegen.
Let me further quantise this:
It would be great if there was int10 infrastructure which would do just the above. * Seabios can show us its menu. * Grub will then give us its menu too. * The linux kernel will no longer think that it is talking to CGA and will use the correct fontsize while setting the cursor (so that we no longer get a floating cursor).
Luc Verhaegen.