Another way of using ADLO

bendany bendany at mistdl.com
Tue Apr 29 03:41:01 CEST 2003


Hm, It seems that my way is buggy, But it works. ;-)

I am trying to use the VGA with LinuxBIOS. since I am trying to use the Xwindows.
if you want to start the Xserver, you must have the vgabios. I think when the Xserver startup, it will probe the videocard. but 
since the LinuxBIOS does not have the videobios. so the Xserver crash. 
you can using the Xserver with the kernel framebuffer driver. such as fbdev. but it lack the ability of hardware accel. such 
as play the movie fullscreen. so use the ADLO & bochs bios & vgabios will give you a second way to run the Xserver.
since the LinuxBIOS switch the CPU into protected mode early, and the commercial vgabios runs in realmode. so the commercial 
vgabios cann't run after the LinuxBIOS. so the ADLO will do some preparation works. Load the bochs bios & vgabios. switch the 
CPU to the realmode. execute the bochs bios.
the bochs will try to init the vgabios first.it scan the address 0xC0000 to 0xC7FFF in 2k increments. and then scan the General 
ROM from 0xC8000 to 0xDFFFF in 2k increments, so if we put the etherboot+AA patch after the address of vgabios. the etherboot
will be excuted after bochs init the vgabios.
the way why I do this is that the bochs bios is lack the ability of dealing with the real hardware. such as ide harddisk. In my experiment,
when I use the IBM 30G harddisk. the speed of lilo & grub load the kernel normally, but when I use the flash IDE. the speed of lilo &
grub , or syslinux, is too slow.

if you want to run the etherboot with the bochs bios. you must do some work yourself.
first, using ADLO to get your own vgabios. my mainboard chipset is sis630. the vgabios is 48kb. plus the etherboot+AA rom.
and the bochs bios .altogether 144kb. and the ADLO only provide 3 types of elf loader. so you must create the 145kb loader yourself.
and also modify the loader.s.
and you will need to modify the etherboot5.0.6+AA patch too.

hope help.
Best regards.
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