On Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:06:05 -0400, Tarl Neustaedter wrote:
On 2011-Jul-19 18:50 , Alexander von Gluck wrote:
It sounds like your display driver didn't initialize them.
Just to verify, your == OpenBIOS' display driver? Or should the OS do something?
Correct. Either FCode from a card or some kind of builtin driver that Openbios knows to attach to a PCI node.
This doesn't seem right, these commands work on OpenFirmware as-is. Their goal is to clear the text OpenBIOS console and toggle the cursor.
Example:
Type: toggle-cursor at the OpenFirmware prompt on any mac and the cursor will disappear / reappear. erase-screen and the OpenFirmware screen will erase.
Correct. It sounds like the video driver in your environment isn't initializing, so these defer words aren't getting set up. The IEEE 1275 specification indicates these are required to be initialized as part of the terminal emulator package, which is the piece of code which knows how to translate from text to bits on a screen.
There is a bunch more about this under the fb8-* words in the specification, particularly see the fb8-install method.
Thanks for the information. Do you know of a fb8-install method + arguments that would work on qemu and real hardware?
Here is the situation: Our boot menu works on the Apple OpenFirmware implementation as-is without fb8-install. (and erase-screen, etc work) Out boot menu needs fb8-install on OpenBIOS to function (which is the correct way from what I gather in the OpenFirmware specs)
Calling fb8-install alone on the Apple hardware (PowerMac 3,5 4.2.5f1) seems to cause the screen to lock up an no longer update. Calling fb8-install alone on OpenBIOS does overlay erase-screen, etc... however they don't do anything (see attached)
Thoughts?
Thanks! -- Alex
