On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 02:06:53AM +0100, Julian Pidancet wrote:
On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Kevin O'Connor kevin@koconnor.net wrote:
It should work. Ideally, someone would complete the port of the "lgpl vgabios". This involves translating the remaining 16bit assembler to C code and then doing lots of testing on the result.
I havn't tried to run the ROM yet. Could you be more precise about what works (or what is supposed to be working), what's not, and what exactly remains to be translated ? I'd like to make an idea of the amount of work required to have a ROM equivalent to vgabios.
If you look at the "lgpl vgabios" source - I ported vgabios.c but did not convert vbe.c nor clext.c. As for what works - I was able to launch qemu and run guests. However, the vbe extensions weren't present, and so most guests wouldn't attempt to increase resolution or they had other features not available. Also, I was seeing the grub screen come up as black-and-white - which may be due to lack of VBE, but may also have been due to a bug somewhere in the port.
-Kevin
Hi,
I havn't tried to run the ROM yet. Could you be more precise about what works (or what is supposed to be working), what's not, and what exactly remains to be translated ? I'd like to make an idea of the amount of work required to have a ROM equivalent to vgabios.
If you look at the "lgpl vgabios" source - I ported vgabios.c but did not convert vbe.c nor clext.c. As for what works - I was able to launch qemu and run guests.
Just having a quick look at the sources: These days qemu stores the vgabios in the ROM bar of the emulated vga card. Thus it needs a proper PCIBIOS header, otherwise SeaBIOS will not load it.
However, the vbe extensions weren't present, and so most guests wouldn't attempt to increase resolution or they had other features not available.
Pretty normal behaviour without VBE ;)
Also, I was seeing the grub screen come up as black-and-white - which may be due to lack of VBE, but may also have been due to a bug somewhere in the port.
Hard to say without more details. grub can use gfx mode and come up with a fancy background picture. That isn't upstream though and different distros use different patches to do this. Might be at least some versions depend on VBE for this. grub has a text mode fallback. That can be colored too, depends on the configuration, by default it is black-and-white.
cheers, Gerd
-
Gerd Hoffmann -
Kevin O'Connor