Another way of using ADLO

ron minnich rminnich at lanl.gov
Tue Apr 29 09:17:01 CEST 2003


On Thu, 1 May 2003, bendany wrote:

> I am trying to use the VGA with LinuxBIOS. since I am trying to use the
> Xwindows. if you want to start the Xserver, you must have the vgabios. I
> think when the Xserver startup, it will probe the videocard. but since
> the LinuxBIOS does not have the videobios. so the Xserver crash.

no, the problem is that the Xserver emulation of an 8086 has bugs, and so 
it crashes. There are some real problems with the X11 VGA support.


> you can using the Xserver with the kernel framebuffer driver. such as
> fbdev. but it lack the ability of hardware accel. such as play the movie
> fullscreen. so use the ADLO & bochs bios & vgabios will give you a
> second way to run the Xserver. since the LinuxBIOS switch the CPU into
> protected mode early, and the commercial vgabios runs in realmode. so
> the commercial vgabios cann't run after the LinuxBIOS. so the ADLO will
> do some preparation works. Load the bochs bios & vgabios. switch the CPU
> to the realmode. execute the bochs bios. the bochs will try to init the
> vgabios first.it scan the address 0xC0000 to 0xC7FFF in 2k increments.
> and then scan the General ROM from 0xC8000 to 0xDFFFF in 2k increments,
> so if we put the etherboot+AA patch after the address of vgabios. the
> etherboot will be excuted after bochs init the vgabios. the way why I do
> this is that the bochs bios is lack the ability of dealing with the real
> hardware. such as ide harddisk. In my experiment, when I use the IBM 30G
> harddisk. the speed of lilo & grub load the kernel normally, but when I
> use the flash IDE. the speed of lilo & grub , or syslinux, is too slow.

Actually, this is very helpful but not completely right. I am glad you got 
your vga to work however.

ron




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