On Thu, 1 May 2003, bendany wrote:
I am trying to use the VGA with LinuxBIOS. since I am trying to use the Xwindows. if you want to start the Xserver, you must have the vgabios. I think when the Xserver startup, it will probe the videocard. but since the LinuxBIOS does not have the videobios. so the Xserver crash.
no, the problem is that the Xserver emulation of an 8086 has bugs, and so it crashes. There are some real problems with the X11 VGA support.
you can using the Xserver with the kernel framebuffer driver. such as fbdev. but it lack the ability of hardware accel. such as play the movie fullscreen. so use the ADLO & bochs bios & vgabios will give you a second way to run the Xserver. since the LinuxBIOS switch the CPU into protected mode early, and the commercial vgabios runs in realmode. so the commercial vgabios cann't run after the LinuxBIOS. so the ADLO will do some preparation works. Load the bochs bios & vgabios. switch the CPU to the realmode. execute the bochs bios. the bochs will try to init the vgabios first.it scan the address 0xC0000 to 0xC7FFF in 2k increments. and then scan the General ROM from 0xC8000 to 0xDFFFF in 2k increments, so if we put the etherboot+AA patch after the address of vgabios. the etherboot will be excuted after bochs init the vgabios. the way why I do this is that the bochs bios is lack the ability of dealing with the real hardware. such as ide harddisk. In my experiment, when I use the IBM 30G harddisk. the speed of lilo & grub load the kernel normally, but when I use the flash IDE. the speed of lilo & grub , or syslinux, is too slow.
Actually, this is very helpful but not completely right. I am glad you got your vga to work however.
ron