On 2011-Jul-20 10:58 , Alexander von Gluck wrote:
Thanks for the information. Do you know of a fb8-install method + arguments that would work on qemu and real hardware?
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with QEMU itself - my interest in OpenBIOS is that I work on OpenBoot (another IEEE 1275 implementation) at Sun/Oracle.
Here is the situation: Our boot menu works on the Apple OpenFirmware implementation as-is without fb8-install. (and erase-screen, etc work)
That sounds right. fb8-install is supposed to be called by the video driver once things are set up, to define what parameters can be used. That something the display driver writes, not you.
Out boot menu needs fb8-install on OpenBIOS to function (which is the correct way from what I gather in the OpenFirmware specs)
More properly, it sounds like you need a system where the video driver has called fb8-install. The point is that your boot menu needs a bunch of display-specific methods and whatever video driver QEMU is using doesn't seem to have them.
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.
Oh, yeah. Don't do that. Apple probably does something different. fb8-install is supposed to be the last step after the video driver has set everything up, and they probably install things in some other way. fb8-install is probably clobbering whatever they did.
Calling fb8-install alone on OpenBIOS does overlay erase-screen, etc... however they don't do anything (see attached)
Right. The problem wasn't you failing to call fb8-install, it's display driver support for all the video functions you are calling. I pointed you at fb8-install simply to get you in the right area - all the other fb8-* functions also have to be defined and have to be backed up by a display driver that implements them.