On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 12:33:04PM +0200, Mart Raudsepp wrote: > All the other bootloaders used as payloads work just fine without a VGA > BIOS - FILO, etherboot, etc. Under not assuming boot loaders will just > "work" without a VGA BIOS, do you mean the boot loaders found in MBRs?
Yes. > > There has been discussion of porting the open source vga bios to > > geode. > I've seen some vague mentions of it, but nothing concrete besides plans > without details, and nothing even close to actual code :( > I hope I've just missed something. While on that topic, some more > detailed planning might be useful - is there something this is good to > be based on? is there a good idea how it should get hooked it? etc There was a thread on this starting at: http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2008-October/039657.html There exists an open source vga bios today ( http://www.nongnu.org/vgabios/ ). So, in theory one could port it to the geode. I'd recommend porting the current open source vga bios to gcc (much like SeaBIOS is a port of bochs bios to gcc). Then, one would need to either change all the ioport calls in the bios to use the geode equivalents, or implement some vsa/smm wrapper that caught the vga ioport accesses and emulated their functionality. > > You'll need the vga bios for xp. One can verify this with qemu - > > without the vga bios it wont start. > > Most unfortunate. What is it wanting from it besides just drawing stuff. > Is it expecting some kind of replies or return values back unlike some > other things? I don't know. A qemu test shows grub wants a vga bios too. Lilo might still work. -Kevin -- coreboot mailing list: [email protected] http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
