[SeaBIOS] Status of SeaBIOS VGA bios.

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi,

>> I havn't tried to run the ROM yet. Could you be more precise about
>> what works (or what is supposed to be working), what's not, and what
>> exactly remains to be translated ? I'd like to make an idea of the
>> amount of work required to have a ROM equivalent to vgabios.
> 
> If you look at the "lgpl vgabios" source - I ported vgabios.c but did
> not convert vbe.c nor clext.c.  As for what works - I was able to
> launch qemu and run guests.

Just having a quick look at the sources:  These days qemu stores the
vgabios in the ROM bar of the emulated vga card.  Thus it needs a proper
PCIBIOS header, otherwise SeaBIOS will not load it.

> However, the vbe extensions weren't
> present, and so most guests wouldn't attempt to increase resolution or
> they had other features not available.

Pretty normal behaviour without VBE ;)

> Also, I was seeing the grub
> screen come up as black-and-white - which may be due to lack of VBE,
> but may also have been due to a bug somewhere in the port.

Hard to say without more details.  grub can use gfx mode and come up
with a fancy background picture.  That isn't upstream though and
different distros use different patches to do this.  Might be at least
some versions depend on VBE for this.  grub has a text mode fallback.
That can be colored too, depends on the configuration, by default it is
black-and-white.

cheers,
  Gerd