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

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 09/03/16 18:03, Programmingkid wrote:

>> 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?

As a starting point, try logging the writes to the VGA registers in QEMU
and see how they differ between 8-bit and 32-bit colour depths.
Unfortunately I'm fairly tied up with other things right now, but I will
try and help out if you post questions to the list.


ATB,

Mark.