Re: Generic VESA framebuffer driver and Video card BOOT?

On Fri, 15 Oct 2004, Zachary Smith wrote:

Kendall Bennett wrote:

quoted

Zachary Smith [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

The problem of x86-only BIOSes is one of the videocard
manufacturers' own making which, in the spirit of good engineering,
they should fix before requiring a downstream kludge. 

quoted

Forgetting the fact that the BIOS image is x86, why
not think about the x86 BIOS image as being a set of 'generic'
instructions or p-code

Yes, this idea occurred to me after I posted my response.

But if you're going to add x86 emulation to the non-x86 kernels
perhaps it would be nice if you could find a way to permit
users to run x86 applications as well seamlessly.

Ugh... There's a big difference between a 16-bit 8086 emulator to run BIOS code
and a full-fletched 32-bit 80386 (or higher) emulator...

Although that would introduce a tradeoff: kernel code should be
small which is bound to be slow in the case of an emulator,
which is OK for running BIOS code, but a user running apps
probably prefer optimized code which may be bigger.

We already have qemu.

On the other hand, a person running a free emulator doesn't
really have the option of great speed :)

Really? We already have qemu.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds


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