[SeaBIOS] [PATCH RFC 5/7] Add PMM memory allocation facilities for VGA option ROMs

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 11:59:16AM +0000, Mark Marshall wrote:
> According to the bits of the PCI spec that I can find, 
> the option ROM is copied into RAM which is left read-write 
> while the initialisation vector is called, and the RAM is 
> then set to read-only after this time.  Does your VGA option 
> ROM use this feature?  Do you know of any other's that do?  

Yes - the SeaBIOS vga rom will self modify.  I've seen several other
option roms that self modify.

> (This is in the V2.1 and V3.0 PCI spec's.  Also in at least 
> the V3.0 PCI spec is says that the initialisation code is 
> run in "big real mode", with 4G segments, do you know of 
> any code that uses this feature?).

Yes - I've seen other option roms that only work when called in
big-real mode.  SeaBIOS supports this.  The SeaBIOS vga option rom
doesn't require it though.

> PS.
> I'm interested in this because I wrote the OGP VGA BIOS 
> (in 16-bit x86 ASM), a while ago now.  A choice made for 
> two reasons really: 1, I hadn't found SeaBIOS (And didn't 
> know quite how well you could get gcc to produce 16-bit 
> code), and 2, I really wanted to write a chunk of 16-bit 
> assembler (this was a hobby, not work, so I felt I could 
> make a crazy choice like that and get away with it).
> 
> If I get a free afternoon, I will try to convert that code 
> to use the SeaBIOS VGA framework.  It's interesting to note
> that we have both implemented features that are not in the 
> other's BIOS.

Sounds interesting.

-Kevin