BIOS calls

Li-Ta Lo ollie at lanl.gov
Wed Mar 3 11:05:01 CET 2004


On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 16:42, Daniel Sheltraw wrote:
> Quoting ron minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov>:
> 
> > On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Daniel Sheltraw wrote:
> > 
> > > Does LinuxBIOS have a protected-mode API that can be used in 
> > > kernel-space to config devices similar to the old DOS-based
> > > BIOS calls in real-mode?
> > 
> > no, intentionally not. We don't ever want to get back into that
> > nightmare 
> > unless it becomes hopelessly unavoidable.
> > 
> > ron
> > 
> > 
> Ron
> 
> I have been used Linux and RTAI-Linux to develop a hard real-time
> application called RTStim which is used in functional neuroimaging
> experimentation. RTStim makes use of two video cards. One card is
> controlled by normal Linux and provides a GUI to RTStim. The other
> card provides visual stimuli to subjects. To configure the second 
> video card we have been using Linux's ability to configure video
> while still in real mode by modifying the lilo config file. It would
> be fantastic if we could eliminate the modification of this config 
> file in the installation of RTStim. If we had a BIOS call to do
> such a thing that would be ideal.
> 
> Do you know how to access such configuration ROM for video while
> in protected-mode.?
> 

If the only thing you want to deal with is VGA, you don't need any
legacy bios call facility. We have emulators which can init the
VGA card in user mode.

BTW, are you using BOTH card in the same system ? Don't they conflict
each other ?

Ollie





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