VGA and LinuxBios

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Wed Dec 11 04:26:01 CET 2002


"Steve M. Gehlbach" <steve at nexpath.com> writes:

> > I've heard of some code that already works with the vt8601 that I'm
> > looking to use.
> >
> > Andy
> 
> There should be a way to put the 8601a specific stuff in
> northbridge/via/8601a, and try and keep vga generic (legacy) register code
> in a central place (eg, pc80/). This worked well for stpc and sis630; most
> of the code is common even though the chips are radically different, they
> both match well to legacy VGA.  There are also changes to lib/video_subr.c
> since it currently doesn't move the cursor or use the correct memory address
> for text.

Not a big surprise on the latter as the code was written but never really
tested.

> The only reason this hasn't been integrated into linuxbios codebase at this
> point is partly lack of interest (I think) in this group, since most use the
> serial console, and partly that I have been off on other things lately.

Video is a minor part of things, but it is starting to get annoying
to be able to do an entire cluster with LinuxBIOS all except a management
node, which needs video and a keyboard.  

> All of my projects use the vga console, so as I use various integrated
> chipsets, I will be adding vga for each.  Until this gets into the linuxbios
> base, anyone that wants the code just send me an email.  It's all gpl of
> course.

I would certainly be interested.  I don't know if I could find the time
to do anything with it but I can at least collect up some code until
I have time to pursue it further.

Eric




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