Calling VGA init routine

[prasun kapoor]

hello all,

I am writing my own BIOS for an x86 system, and have
it running and booting an OS pretty well, as long as
everything is on the serial port. I figure I need to
call init of the VGA BIOS to have the video card
working.

I would like to know how I can gop about doing this. 
If anyone have a code snippet, for calling the VGA
BIOS it would be great! I would very much appreciate
it if someone has this code handy or give me a pointer
to where I can find it.

I am using an ASUS P3B-F board with ATI ( Rage II C
AGP) video card on it.

Thanks in Advance,
Prasun Kapoor

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Hi Prasun,
> I am writing my own BIOS for an x86 system, and have
> it running and booting an OS pretty well, as long as
> everything is on the serial port. I figure I need to
> call init of the VGA BIOS to have the video card
> working.

You should have a look at the LinuxBIOS Mailinglist archives,
this was heavily discussed there the last few days:
        http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/linuxbios/
> I would like to know how I can gop about doing this. 
> If anyone have a code snippet, for calling the VGA
> BIOS it would be great! I would very much appreciate
> it if someone has this code handy or give me a pointer
> to where I can find it.

Basically, you have two different approaches:

1) Looking at what the graphics adapter bios does with the hardware.
   This is a less generic way and it has to be done for every single
   graphics adapter to be supported. You can patch XFree86's bios
   emulation to trace all hardware access to see what your bios does
   with your graphics card. You might need a non-x86 platform pci
   machine for that. Or you look at the PCI cards config registers after
   it has been initialized and write those values to the card yourself.
   The later is probably not working for all graphics cards, as those
   tend to be flawed by design.

2) create the infrastructure necessary to execute the graphics card's 
   bios. First off, you have to provide int10/1a bios wrappers, for 
   pci detection and alike. For x86 platforms you have to run the card
   firmware in vm86 mode. Examples can be found in dosemu.
   For non-x86 you have to provide an x86 emulation, such as scitech's 
   x86emu (which is used by XFree86)

Best regards,
  Stefan Reinauer