Framebuffer or standard VGA ?

[ollie lho]

On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 09:51, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> ollie lho <ollie at sis.com.tw> writes:
> > 
> > What is AFAICS ??
> 
> As Far As I Can See
> > 
> > The catch is, for most cases, you have to program those "non-standard" 
> > undocumented extended register first then these Standard VGA registers
> > become "Standard". You can try it anyway.
> 
> Ollie I haven't looked but do you know if there is anything comparable to 
> the memory initialization hassels LinuxBIOS has to go through?  Or has
> your experience been just dumping the correct values in the correct
> registers?
> 

It depends, I think. For integrated VGA like SiS', it is not necessary
to do Video DRAM init/sizing so a stupid save/restore procedure is 
sufficient to turn VGA to correct mode. (well, there are still two 
problems, 1. you have to know where are these registers, 2. sometimes
the 'sequence' of save/restore does matter). But for standalone VGA 
chips with its own DRAM, it requires almost the same hassles as system
DRAM.   


Ollie