Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] Generic VESA framebuffer driver and Video card BOOT?

Gerd Knorr [off-list ref] wrote:

"Kendall Bennett" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Note that the SNAPBoot code uses the x86emu BIOS emulator project as the 
core CPU emulation technology, and project we have been actively involved 
with for many years since the licensing on the project was changed to 
MIT/BSD style licensing and incorporated into the XFree86 project.

quoted

So what we would like to find out is how much interest there might be in 
both an updated VESA framebuffer console driver as well as the code for 
the Video card BOOT process being contributed to the maintstream kernel. 

It certainly would be nice to have that.  Not nessesarely in the
kernel through, people tend not to like such complex stuff like
cpu emulation in the kernel for good reasons.  

Well think about it as an x86 p-code interpreter then ;-) Kind of like a 
forth interpreter for Open Firmware but we use an x86 image instead.

The kernel can run userspace apps (modprobe, hotplug), that
mechanism could be used to invoke a userspace tool which does the
boot / mode switching. Having it in userspace likely also makes it
easier to share code with X11. 

I agree entirely, provided we can find a way to get this to run really 
early in the boot sequence. We need this for non-x86 embedded machines 
such as PowerPC and MIPS, not for x86 platforms where the BIOS can be 
called from the boot loader easily.

Have you talked to the powermanagement guys btw.?  One of the
major issues with suspend-to-ram is to get the graphics card back
online, and SNAPBoot might help to fix this too.  I'm not sure a
userspace solution would work for *that* through. 

That is a good point. Another good reason to have the code in there ;-)

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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