On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 12:16:32AM +0100, Julian Pidancet wrote:
Hi,
I stumbled across the vgasrc directory in the SeaBIOS git tree which seem to contain the source of a VGA Bios. I havn't found any related documentation nor announcements regarding this, and there is no Makefiles or scripts to build it. That's why I'm enquiring here about the status of this project.
You can build the vgabios by running:
make out/vgabios.bin
There was a brief note on the vga code some time back:
http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2009-May/047775.html
I've got several questions:
- What is the general status of this project ?
I started converting the VGA bios from the "lgpl vga bios" project ( http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/vgabios/ ) a couple of years ago. I converted the base code, but did not have time to convert the "VBE" or the "cirrus" code.
There was also an effort a few years back to get the code running on real hardware that had some success.
- Is this code intended to be executed in a 32bit environment by
transitionning from 16bit to 32bit mode for each BIOS call as SeaBIOS already does ?
The current seabios vgabios code runs exclusively in 16bit mode. (Note, SeaBIOS also has some calls handled entirely in 16bit mode as well.)
- Is this code able to run independantly from SeaBIOS ?
It should - but I've never tested it that way.
- How can I build the sources ?
make out/vgabios.bin
I am currently working on a emulated graphic adapter for Xen and I would like to implement a VBE driver for it. This VGA BIOS seems to be a good base for that kind of work. Would that be possible ?
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.
-Kevin