EPIA Howto Update

SONE Takeshi ts1 at cma.co.jp
Fri Jul 18 00:44:00 CEST 2003


On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 01:29:48AM +0100, Mark Wilkinson wrote:
> 	Just a quick note to say that I've updated my EPIA howto to include a little  
> section for the brave on enabling the onboard VGA.
> 
> This is based on Sone Takeshi's work.
> 
> Thanks to Andrew Ip for committing the update to CVS.


Hi Mark,
Thank you for your work.

Perhaps everyone already forgets about it, but I was asked by Ron
for a HOWTO on EPIA+VGA.
I started it, but it isn't finished. (I was fiddling with BOOT_IDE etc
to include in my documentation...)
Now that your HOWTO covers VGA, everything is OK.

Some points...

- Line 37-40:
    NOTE: At present, the epia can be booted with a serial console. Power
	  management to turn off the power is not available, neither is the
	  video bios. Memeory is currenly hard coded to report 64M - you must
	  have at least this much memory.

You can use video console once VGA is enabled (option VIDEO_CONSOLE=1).
It isn't very useful however, since VGA initialization is almost at the
end of LinuxBIOS execution. 
Memory configuration is also fixed already.

- Line 364-367:
                0 - Disable Framebuffer
                1 - 1 Mbyte
                2 - 2 Mbytes
                8 - 8 Mbytes

This is incorrect. Valid values are 2, 4, and 8 (MB).
To disable framebuffer, remove the option HAVE_FRAMEBUFFER.

Also, now I use folowing lines in the config for the VGA BIOS image to be
patched in the romimage:
    option ZKERNEL_START=0xfffc0000
    option VGABIOS_START=0xfffe0000
    addaction romimage dd if=/path/to/vgabios.bin of=romimage bs=65536 \
	seek=2 conv=sync conv=notrunc
This way you don't have to handcraft the vga+eb payload.

--
Takeshi



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