On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 12:33:04PM +0200, Mart Raudsepp wrote:
All the other bootloaders used as payloads work just fine without a VGA BIOS - FILO, etherboot, etc. Under not assuming boot loaders will just "work" without a VGA BIOS, do you mean the boot loaders found in MBRs?
Yes.
There has been discussion of porting the open source vga bios to geode.
I've seen some vague mentions of it, but nothing concrete besides plans without details, and nothing even close to actual code :( I hope I've just missed something. While on that topic, some more detailed planning might be useful - is there something this is good to be based on? is there a good idea how it should get hooked it? etc
There was a thread on this starting at:
http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2008-October/039657.html
There exists an open source vga bios today ( http://www.nongnu.org/vgabios/ ). So, in theory one could port it to the geode.
I'd recommend porting the current open source vga bios to gcc (much like SeaBIOS is a port of bochs bios to gcc). Then, one would need to either change all the ioport calls in the bios to use the geode equivalents, or implement some vsa/smm wrapper that caught the vga ioport accesses and emulated their functionality.
You'll need the vga bios for xp. One can verify this with qemu - without the vga bios it wont start.
Most unfortunate. What is it wanting from it besides just drawing stuff. Is it expecting some kind of replies or return values back unlike some other things?
I don't know. A qemu test shows grub wants a vga bios too. Lilo might still work.
-Kevin