[LinuxBIOS] C3 Lightning Talk abstract

[Richard Smith]

Stefan Reinauer wrote:

> * Richard Smith <smithbone at gmail.com> [061207 14:28]:
>> I think for a demo you want to show LaB (Linux as Bootloader, where
>> linux is in the ROM) and boot linux directly to a shell prompt, as fast
>> as you can make it.  Thats a short, powerful demo.
>  
> Whats the way to go here? Use the stuff with the nice OLPC graphics?
> Is that generically usable?

I /dev/fb0 is the only graphics dependency.  So if you can get a
framebuffer working then perhaps.  I'm not sure if Jordan did some gxfb
custom stuff in there.  It was optimized for size on the OLPC platform.
 Should not be that hard though to make it generic.

For the demo I was more thinking of just the kernel boot messages.  To a
geek like me I'm more impressed with that rather than flashy graphics.

> buildrom needs tuning in a lot of places to be non-OLPC it seemed last
> time I looked at it.

It would need some tuning if you wanted to use buildrom.  I was thinking
 he would just hand roll something.

If someone wanted to try buildrom I can fix up things pretty quick.
Just tell me what LB target to use.

> Is there some way to get it use vesafb (without bios callbacks, see
> x86_64 version) rather than a native chipset (ie.  have graphics mode
> enabled before starting linux)
> Recompiling your bios if you change the graphics card is a little clumsy

If you have run the video bios and you assume that the graphics mode has
been set ahead of time then yes I think we should be able to include
some vesafb code into linuxbios.  The code for a single bit depth,
640x480, no mode changes, slow text, should be pretty small and fairly
easy to maintain since it will not change much.

-- 
Richard A. Smith