"Steve M. Gehlbach" steve@nexpath.com writes:
I've heard of some code that already works with the vt8601 that I'm looking to use.
Andy
There should be a way to put the 8601a specific stuff in northbridge/via/8601a, and try and keep vga generic (legacy) register code in a central place (eg, pc80/). This worked well for stpc and sis630; most of the code is common even though the chips are radically different, they both match well to legacy VGA. There are also changes to lib/video_subr.c since it currently doesn't move the cursor or use the correct memory address for text.
Not a big surprise on the latter as the code was written but never really tested.
The only reason this hasn't been integrated into linuxbios codebase at this point is partly lack of interest (I think) in this group, since most use the serial console, and partly that I have been off on other things lately.
Video is a minor part of things, but it is starting to get annoying to be able to do an entire cluster with LinuxBIOS all except a management node, which needs video and a keyboard.
All of my projects use the vga console, so as I use various integrated chipsets, I will be adding vga for each. Until this gets into the linuxbios base, anyone that wants the code just send me an email. It's all gpl of course.
I would certainly be interested. I don't know if I could find the time to do anything with it but I can at least collect up some code until I have time to pursue it further.
Eric