On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 08:59:50AM +0100, Peter Stuge wrote:
Gleb Natapov wrote:
If someone can point out a spec to the contrary I'd be happy to change the default in SeaBIOS.
There is spec and there is real life. Real life should take precedence.
In real life, SeaBIOS does not need to run the VGA BIOS when I resume my ThinkPad with coreboot.
So do not run it on a ThinkPad. BTW are you resuming to X? Can you switch to a console and suspend/resume there to see if it works?
Why should QEMU impose an artificial requirement which additionally aligns poorly with the common specifications?
There is nothing artificial about the requirement. It exists on real HW. Here for instance: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=130909
"This is how it always was" is fine to have some temporary legacy support, but it's not an excuse to not fix the problem properly, in the right place.
There is not way OSMP can restore unknown state of a random vga card without special driver for that card.
It sounds like QEMU just needs a simple KMS driver. Isn't there actually one already, which might fit well?
QEMU has no drivers. It has devices.
This is why vgabios exists in the first place.
VGA BIOS exists because 30 years ago it seemed like a good idea to abstract graphics hardware, so that the only operating system at the time did not have to know hardware details.
That model completely and utterly fails with every operating system today, where indeed there are, must be and should be, device drivers.
And meanwhile, in real life, you cannot resume Linux into console. This abstract graphics HW surely helped Linux adoption. Without it you wouldn't be able to run Linux even in a text mode on most HW in late 90s since nobody published HW spec and wrote drivers for Linux.
I am also not asking to change SeaBIOS default. Just get us back compile time option to always enable it.
It seems older QEMU would work fine also without the option given the right OS drivers. In case they aren't actually available I guess a SeaBIOS compile time option is the only workaround.
-- Gleb.