Dieter wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, James Richard Tyrer writes:
BTW: The support to transfer the BOOT image to the EV box is only
needed if you can provide also back-channel communication for
HID (at least keyboard), which can be used to configure the BIOS,
editing via GRUB loader, resolving root mount point issues with
certain initrd..
Wouldn't the keyboard and mouse be on the PC. If using X, you
would be connecting to a remote X server. There is no need for a
hardware connection to the X server for the keyboard and mouse.
The X server (ethervideo box) needs a keyboard and mouse. You want a
keyboard and mouse to be near the display, not on the other end of
the building (or in theory on the other side of the world). The
whole point of using Ethernet is to allow locating the hot noisy
computer away from the display/keyboard/mouse.
Actually, I suppose that it would be good to have 2 USB sockets on the
box so that you could connect a keyboard and mouse. However, my point,
which I admit isn't clear, is that this is not required -- that you
could connect them to the PC if that was more convenient in your
particular setup.
Otherwise nobody needs to know about the PC's boot, if he/she can
do nothing about it and has to go to the console.
It is necessary to configure the PC motherboard although this is
becoming less and less necessary.
If the boot fails (which happens all too often) you need the console
to recover.
BTW: is it possible for the X box to open a new window when
some PC boots up and display its console?
Basically, no. It would have to start X for this to happen.
Since the boot mode uses only the VGA BIOS routines to directly
access the hardware this wouldn't work.
Hey, that is bad concept! Why you want to run a video-transfer
driver and on top of that the X, if you can run the X directly on
the target?
I presume that you didn't mean running both of them at the same
time. Well, that is the common way of doing it:
1. The BIOS communicates with the console using the VGA BIOS calls
2. After the OS boots, it communicates with the console using the
console driver.
How does this "console driver" communicate with the actual hardware?
Probably varies from one OS to the next.
Yes, it would be an OS driver and just as with any video board you need
a driver that does both console and graphics.
3. After the OS startup is complete, X is started.
What do you mean by "X is started".
In the case of having an X server running on the box, that would be when
an X client started on the PC.
With this setup we wouldn't run an X server on the computer, it would
run on the ethervideo box. Some users will probably want xdm(1).
Others might want something else.
So if the box runs the X server, the BIOS extension will contain
a X client (assuming underlying networking is up and running) and
then you can pop up a boot image on the target device. Using X
protocol.
I hadn't thought of that, but yes that might work. You would also
need a console driver for step #2. Actually, if this would work,
it sounds like a good idea. There are issues:
What would you do to run OSes other than *NIX variants?
My understanding is that Plan-9 folks don't especially like X11.
Since we are FLOSS I guess they can port their preferred windowing
system. Has VMS been ported to x86/amd64 machines? As mentioned
previously we need support for FreeDOS.
You can't run X (communicate with an X terminal) until after
you boot the OS and start X or an X compatible thin client
system.
The EV will implement an X server if it has a processor. It is an
old technology, so today you should be able to implement it using
a 8 bit microcontroller :)
But, you need to have a client running on the PC.
The firmware on the VGA-BIOS-to-X11-Ethernet card translates VGA
calls into X11 calls. So the firmware is an X11 client.
Well, yes and no. It would be a subset of an X11 client.
--
James Tyrer
Linux (mostly) From Scratch
_______________________________________________
Open-hardware-ethervideo mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hardware-ethervideo
