[LinuxBIOS] RESEND: patch: fix the problem with CONFIG_CONSOLE_VGA not pulling in the emulator

ron minnich rminnich at gmail.com
Fri Jan 4 00:23:46 CET 2008


On Jan 3, 2008 3:15 PM, Torsten Duwe <duwe at lst.de> wrote:
> On Thursday 03 January 2008, ron minnich wrote:
> > This is a resend from yesterday, I am hoping for an ack :-)
>
> Not yet. This fixes the problem Luc found along the way, and which nobody has
> cared about for a while.
>
> How do we want to express now that the console is on a VGA-compatible device
> without the necessity for any emulator (e.g. onboard SiS300, unichrome, i810
> or maybe RS480)?

well, will those on-board devices have an option ROM associated with
them? If not, there is no issue; the option ROM won't be run. Luc has
already set up his native code to set the vga_inited variable.

There's a harder problem. What if we're on a a system with a unichrome
and, for whatever reason, somebody drops in a different graphics card
and wants that to be the console? Of the set of devices that *could*
be the console, which one *should* be the console?

For this latter case, in which there is a native non-option-ROM VGA
device and a VGA device with an option ROM, you are going to need to
leave the emulator in, I am afraid. I'm happy to be shown wrong,
because I don't much like this situation.

We never had a good solution to the latter problem. Standard bios
rules are to use the one in the slot, ignoring the on-board device.

Maybe this issue will never come up with a unichrome, but we need to
solve it for other systems with native devices and pci-e slots that
can take non-native cards with option roms.

ron




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