[OpenBIOS] Why some Linux distributions start booting to black screens

Programmingkid programmingkidx at gmail.com
Wed Mar 9 19:03:15 CET 2016


On Mar 9, 2016, at 1:38 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:

> On 08/03/16 20:31, Programmingkid wrote:
> 
>> On Mar 8, 2016, at 2:42 PM, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
>> 
>>> On 08/03/16 03:55, Programmingkid wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Some Linux distributions like Fedora start booting to an all black screen. I found out the reason why is because there appears to be something wrong with the screen node's color! word. 
>>>> 
>>>> If you type these commands in OpenBIOS:
>>>> dev screen
>>>> see color!
>>>> 
>>>> You will see that color! is empty. This would definitely prevent the color of text from being changed. 
>>> 
>>> color! definitely does work as I spent some time digging into it when I
>>> rewrote the framebuffer code a while back. The issue seemed either
>>> endian or depth related because the problem goes away in 8-bit mode,
>>> e.g. try booting with -g 800x600x8 but I didn't really dig that far.
>> 
>> Why is it when I 'see' color! in OpenBIOS, the word is empty?
> 
> Well the "see" routines in OpenBIOS aren't 100% complete IIRC. Take a
> look at driver/vga.fs and in particular color! which should call into
> the VGA palette routines.

I just used -g 800x600x8 in QEMU and the black screen problem was gone. If this is an endian problem, what would you suggest be the solution to the problem? OpenBIOS VGA flag sent to vga.c forcing big endian mode? -VGA-big-endian command-line option?





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