[LinuxBIOS] linuxbios + xf86-video-unichrome: no VGA BIOS needed.

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Luc Verhaegen. <libv at skynet.be> [070317 14:04]:
> > I want it to go into a nice picture/or solid color
> > within less a second after press the ON button.
> 
> Yes, people do seem to want to have a pretty bootsplash. This 
> possibility will be given.
 
I remember we had some bootsplash in LinuxBIOSv1, but it was never
ported over. 

There's two things that are potentially time consuming in hw startup:

* dram init (ie. on large machines)
* compression (on small machines)

In LinuxBIOSv2 the code that does PCI init (and thus initializes the
graphics hardware) is compressed if CONFIG_COMPRESS is set. This means
time is wasted before there is any chance to actually init VGA and show
a splash screen.

In v3 we completely dropped the VGA console code (NOT the VGA init
code!) and leave everything graphical or textual to the payload.
LinuxBIOS _console_ will only be on serial or usb debug. This makes the
code smaller and the bootup look a lot nicer. VGA output is of no use
for debugging because the critical stuff in LinuxBIOS happens before 
we have it.

Stefan

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