Messages in this thread | | | From | "Khimenko Victor" <> | Date | Mon, 13 Dec 1999 07:16:09 +0300 (MSK) | Subject | Re: vesafb on archs !ia32 [Re: Calling VESA BIOS routines from kernel?] |
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In <Pine.LNX.4.10.9912130021370.5629-100000@alpha.random> Andrea Arcangeli (andrea@suse.de) wrote: > On Sun, 12 Dec 1999, Gerd Knorr wrote:
>>Other options are: play tricks with vm86. Use a cpu emulator. XFree86 4.0 >>does the later to boot secondary vga's for multiheaded displays and initialize >>vga boards on !ia32 hardware.
> Should I implement an IA32 emulator in the kernel in order to use the > vesafb video driver with my PC card I have on the alpha?
Yes in 99% cases. If you really want _VESA_fb ...
> Wasn't vesa just a framebuffer mode that should work all over the place?
Yes. As long as "all places" support iX86 real mode...
> I don't care about palette/powersaving and so on. At boot I only want to > tell the card "switch to graphic mode 778 and allow me write my data to the > framebuffer".
And VESA standard only supports such thing from iX86 real mode.
> I can't believe I'll have to write an IA32 emulator into the kernel to do > that (on sane hardware I would achieve the switch with a pair of writel() in > the MMIO I think).
Correct. But if you want use VESAfb you should play by VESA rules. And VESA rules (as of VESA 2.0) are simple: the ONLY way to select video mode is to call specific int from real mode. Sometimes you should even load DOS's driver to have such ability.
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