[SeaBIOS] [PATCH 0/7] vgabios improvements

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 04/16/2014 03:47 PM, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 06:56:57PM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>> Emulating attributes would be great so you can actually navigate
>> bootloader menus.
> 
> I took a look a closer look at this.  Some things I found:
> 
> - it looks like the syslinux menu on recent Fedora versions doesn't
>   work correctly at all in text mode.  This can be most easily seen by
>   disabling CONFIG_VGA_VBE on one of the standard qemu seavgabios
>   builds - without vbe syslinux wont go into graphics mode and the
>   same broken text menu is shown.  So, this isn't a seavgabios issue
>   but a fedora and/or syslinux issue.
> 

?!  I would love more details...

> - I took a quick look at what happens with the ati vgabios on my
>   e350m1 if it is forced into a graphics mode (eg, mode 0x12).  I see
>   similar results to what I see with coreboot native seavgabios.  So,
>   it looks like most of our troubles are with the standard vgabios
>   interface in graphics vs text mode and not something specific to
>   seavgabios.

The non-VESA graphics mode text interface is a bit "special"... and
quite frankly broken on a lot of systems.  I thought SeaBIOS was doing
okay, so there might be a bug here...

	-hpa