[coreboot] SeaBIOS VGA ROM

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 05:27:05PM -0500, Ken.Fuchs at bench.com wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 11:59:59AM -0400, Tom Sylla wrote:
> 
> > > Along the way, you have mentioned that SeaBIOS should run 
> > > the VGA ROM instead of coreboot. How do I build my ROM to
> > > make that happen? My VGA is integrated, so I usually
> > > prepend the ROM, and coreboot runs it. How will SeaBIOS
> > > find it?
> 
> Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> 
> > I think coreboot should load the option roms into ram.
> 
> Does this imply that SeaBIOS doesn't include VGABIOS by
> default?

Seabios does not include a vga bios.  The vga bios is specific to the
vga hardware on the board - I don't think one can implement a generic
vga bios.

> Is VGABIOS the only open source VGA BIOS supported by
> coreboot?

Not sure what you mean.  There is a gpl'd vgabios for use with
emulators (qemu/bochs/etc).  It wont run on real hardware.

> Does SeaBIOS support VGABIOS?

Sure - it will run the vga bios that comes with the vga chip.

Many integrated vga chips don't have their own separate rom chips for
the vga bios.  In these cases, hardware vendors will typically just
include the code in the main flash chip.  In this case, coreboot has
to be able to load the rom from flash into memory so that seabios can
run it.

> Does SeaBIOS run on the bare hardware that has been
> initialized by coreboot?  Or does it only run via qemu?

Seabios runs on my epia-m with just "bare hardware".  There have been
some other success reports, but it is still in an early stage.

Seabios also runs fine on qemu.

-Kevin