VGABIOS is working under LinuxBIOS
Ron, I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card is complete inited before the kernel is loaded. Now I have vga console just like normal bios system. I will try the reduced x86emu and see if it works too. Ollie
Li-Ta Lo <ollie@lanl.gov> writes:
Ron,
I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card is complete inited before the kernel is loaded. Now I have vga console just like normal bios system.
I will try the reduced x86emu and see if it works too.
How large was your resulting linuxbios image. I am trying to see if it looks possible to put LinuxBIOS with VGABIOS support and a linux kernel all in a 1M rom chip. Eric
On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 16:40:49 -0700, Li-Ta Lo <ollie@lanl.gov> wrote:
Ron,
I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card is complete inited before the kernel is loaded. Now I have vga console just like normal bios system.
I will try the reduced x86emu and see if it works too.
Great! Would you commit it to CVS? I would be glad to test it. -- Tao
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Li-Ta Lo wrote:
I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card is complete inited before the kernel is loaded. Now I have vga console just like normal bios system.
well, Ollie, you have just conquered one of our last barriers to desktop usage. Nice work! ron
On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 20:04, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Li-Ta Lo <ollie@lanl.gov> writes:
Ron,
I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card is complete inited before the kernel is loaded. Now I have vga console just like normal bios system.
I will try the reduced x86emu and see if it works too.
How large was your resulting linuxbios image.
with all the debug/tracing output compiled in, I have to set option ROM_IMAGE_SIZE=0x1b000 actually I think 0x1a000 should be enough.
I am trying to see if it looks possible to put LinuxBIOS with VGABIOS support and a linux kernel all in a 1M rom chip.
The linuxbios image should be under 128kB for fallback/normal each. So if you can squeeze the kernel to 768Kb, it would be O.K. Ollie
On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 21:03, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Li-Ta Lo wrote:
I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card is complete inited before the kernel is loaded. Now I have vga console just like normal bios system.
well, Ollie, you have just conquered one of our last barriers to desktop usage.
Nice work!
As I promised, it will be done before my baby is born. Now I have to worry about my baby coming ahead of schedule ;-) BTW, the FILO vga console works fine too. Ollie
--- "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederman@lnxi.com> wrote:
I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card
Man thats excellent news. Were the in-kernel patches from scitech soft helpful?
is complete inited before the kernel is loaded.
I've learned from the vbios guys that the term for this is "POSTed."
I am trying to see if it looks possible to put LinuxBIOS with VGABIOS support and a linux kernel all in a 1M rom chip.
In response to scitech softs request about getting the emu into the kernel Paulo Marques did some work on reducing the size of x86emu by reworking a lot of the instruction calls to be multi-function and removed a lot of duplicate code. He felt that with some more work it would be possible to get the emulator down to 32k. All that in 1M should be possible. I was able to get General Sofware's bios + kernel + initrd in 1M on our last board and that setup contained kexec, TCPIP,ext2,pcmcia,ornoicoo drivers and a minium set of pcmcia tools compiled with uclibc. I think I topped out at 960k. ===== Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? All your favorites on one personal page � Try My Yahoo! http://my.yahoo.com
On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 21:00, Tao Liu wrote:
On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 16:40:49 -0700, Li-Ta Lo <ollie@lanl.gov> wrote:
Ron,
I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card is complete inited before the kernel is loaded. Now I have vga console just like normal bios system.
I will try the reduced x86emu and see if it works too.
Great! Would you commit it to CVS? I would be glad to test it.
I will do it once I clean up it a little bit. There are still some hacks which are very ATI 9800 specific. Ollie
--- "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
well, Ollie, you have just conquered one of our last barriers to desktop usage.
Amen. Where I think you are also really going to see growth is in embedded systems. ===== Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 21:14, Richard Smith wrote:
--- "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederman@lnxi.com> wrote:
I just got the vgabios emulation working in the LinuxBIOS. The VGA card
Man thats excellent news. Were the in-kernel patches from scitech soft helpful?
A little bit, it came too late and I have done almost all the stuff.
is complete inited before the kernel is loaded.
I've learned from the vbios guys that the term for this is "POSTed."
I am trying to see if it looks possible to put LinuxBIOS with VGABIOS support and a linux kernel all in a 1M rom chip.
In response to scitech softs request about getting the emu into the kernel Paulo Marques did some work on reducing the size of x86emu by reworking a lot of the instruction calls to be multi-function and removed a lot of duplicate code. He felt that with some more work it would be possible to get the emulator down to 32k.
I think the next thing would be consolidating various effort on the x86emu. There are just too many different versions to deal with. Ollie
is/will there be a "How To" released on how to add VGA support? -Adam ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Smith" <smithbone69@yahoo.com> To: "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov>; "Li-Ta Lo" <ollie@lanl.gov> Cc: "LinuxBIOS" <linuxbios@clustermatic.org>; "Greg Watson" <gwatson@lanl.gov>; "Stefan Reinauer" <stepan@openbios.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 8:18 PM Subject: Re: VGABIOS is working under LinuxBIOS
--- "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
well, Ollie, you have just conquered one of our last barriers to desktop usage.
Amen. Where I think you are also really going to see growth is in embedded systems.
===== Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc.
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Linuxbios mailing list Linuxbios@clustermatic.org http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
I think the next thing would be consolidating various effort on the x86emu. There are just too many different versions to deal with.
Well the one you want ot go off of is definitely scitech's thats where X.org's version comes from. ===== Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com
On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 21:22, Adam Talbot wrote:
is/will there be a "How To" released on how to add VGA support? -Adam
If it is done correctly (by me), you don't need a HOWTO. It work out of the box like 'BIOS'. Ollie
Great to hear, Thx -Adam ----- Original Message ----- From: "Li-Ta Lo" <ollie@lanl.gov> To: "Adam Talbot" <talbotx@comcast.net> Cc: "Richard Smith" <smithbone69@yahoo.com>; "LinuxBIOS" <linuxbios@clustermatic.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 8:33 PM Subject: Re: VGABIOS is working under LinuxBIOS
On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 21:22, Adam Talbot wrote:
is/will there be a "How To" released on how to add VGA support? -Adam
If it is done correctly (by me), you don't need a HOWTO. It work out of the box like 'BIOS'.
Ollie
_______________________________________________ Linuxbios mailing list Linuxbios@clustermatic.org http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Li-Ta Lo wrote:
If it is done correctly (by me), you don't need a HOWTO. It work out of the box like 'BIOS'.
Ollie, that is true for AGP cards, but for the case of "integrated" vgabios in the one flash image we'll still need the step where we pull the VGABIOS out of the factory BIOS. ron
I have been told that pulling the vgabios is easy with DD. Never tried this my self. Currently I have been decompressing the rom image and adding the vga bios in by hand. Do you think it would be possible to add a script into the buildtarget script, or a vgabios rip script, to rip the vgabios out of the memory? -Adam ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov> To: "Li-Ta Lo" <ollie@lanl.gov> Cc: "Adam Talbot" <talbotx@comcast.net>; "Richard Smith" <smithbone69@yahoo.com>; "LinuxBIOS" <linuxbios@clustermatic.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 8:40 PM Subject: Re: VGABIOS is working under LinuxBIOS
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Li-Ta Lo wrote:
If it is done correctly (by me), you don't need a HOWTO. It work out of the box like 'BIOS'.
Ollie, that is true for AGP cards, but for the case of "integrated" vgabios in the one flash image we'll still need the step where we pull the VGABIOS out of the factory BIOS.
ron
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Adam Talbot wrote:
I have been told that pulling the vgabios is easy with DD. Never tried this my self. Currently I have been decompressing the rom image and adding the vga bios in by hand. Do you think it would be possible to add a script into the buildtarget script, or a vgabios rip script, to rip the vgabios out of the memory?
That's a good idea, we'll look at it if nobody else does. It's easy with dd, the trick is finding it (it's not always where you might expect it to be). ron
participants (6)
-
Adam Talbot -
ebiederman@lnxi.com -
Li-Ta Lo -
Richard Smith -
Ronald G. Minnich -
Tao Liu