On Wednesday 11 September 2002 7:22 am, Steve M. Gehlbach wrote:
Maybe someone knows if alphanumeric mode setup is via the standard VGA register set on most modern VGA cards.
I am afraid you are wrong. For modern VGA cards, there is actually no alphanumeric mode. These alphanumeric mode were simulated by BIOS or drivers. The worst thing, if you have no documents about these extended registers, you have no way to drive the clock gen for Dot clock, Hsync, Vsync.
Are you saying that it is not possible to use a text console with Linux (vgacon.c) with modern VGA cards (BIOS mode 3)? Only framebuffer? Or are you saying that without extra information (ie, the BIOS or the manuals) you can't init it into mode 3? I don't understand your answer.
I thought most vga cards were register compatible with the legacy VGA register set, only that there were a lot of other (sometimes secret) things to setup. Is this wrong?
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this what the Bios chip on the VGA card itself is for (in the case where you have a physical card plugged into the motherboard, and not an all-in-one integrated motherboard chipset) ?
I mean, surely that's the reason why, when you turn on a 'standard' PC with a normal graphics card and a normal Bios, you see the starup messages for the graphics card *first*, and *then* you see the Bios logo and config screen....?
Couldn't LinuxBios simply call the appropriate init code in a graphics card Bios in order to get a text console, and then carry on afterwards in the same way a normal boot loader would ?
Antony.