Ronald G Minnich wrote:
>
> Running the VGA bios is uglier than I thought, now that I have been
> perusing documents and newsgroups.
>
> The big two problems I see are that the code is supposed to run somewhere
> in the 0xc8000-0xe0000 space. That is workable.
>
> The biggest problem I see is that it seems some VGA BIOSes might expect
> BIOS INT support for various functions.
>
> Question to Jeff Garzik: How did X11 handle this mess?
XFree86 on ia32 just flat out runs the code.
XFree86 on PPC uses an ia32 insn emulator to exec the video BIOS.
Due to the PPC method, it makes me think that there are not many, if
any, BIOS INT dependencies.
However... why don't you add basic BIOS INT support as an option? ;-)
Let volunteers fill in the individual BIOS calls. Then we are well on
our way to implementing a totally free BIOS, that the average user can
use to boot Windows or Linux or FreeBSD or...
Jeff
--
Jeff Garzik |
Building 1024 |
MandrakeSoft | Choose life.
