Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 8 Apr 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > > Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > > I need some help on the following: > > > - S3 VGABIOSes are trying to use the timer. I put the vga setup at > > > the end of hardwaremain(), hoping that the timers were on. They are not. > > > Can somebody see why port 40/43 are not doing anything. > > > > And yet etherboot uses the timer and it works. Linux uses the timer > > and it works. > > so I wonder what they're setting up that I am not getting right before I > call vgabios. hmm. > > > > To work correctly you must look exactly like an ibm pc/xt whatever. > > You must give the firmware everything it ever wanted/expected. This > > is a major can of worms and the more you dig into I suspect the more > > weird unxpected and strange cases you will find. This is sane in an > > emulator where you can controll what is going on but in the core I > > really doubt it. > > no, I think you have a good point. But we're not going to support > everything. I am writing off a lot of cards. Anyway, you know way more > than I do in this area so I expect I'll learn the hard way and then ask > you what I should have done :-)
Sounds fair. The saying about ``where fools rush in, and angels fear to tread''. keeps coming to mind :) > on the upside, we do have all the matrox cards working. They make > reasonable demands ... But don't we have framebuffer drivers for those? > But, if I am going to have an emulator in there, I would sure prefer it > to work under linux. And all the options I've seen for Linux carry a lot > of baggage -- geting a simple emulator seperate from, e.g. X11, is not > simple. Very non-modular stuff, it seems. Can dosemu do this? I've seen > what XFree86 can do with the BIOS roms and it is quite impressive -- but > you have to bring X along with it :-( Dosemu can initialize a fair number of video cards, and it gets a few more when you open up all of the ports they want access to. It is worth playing with at least. I don't know what the state with currently manufactured cards is. In dosemu the functionality has been depricated for a while. Our emulation in X is good enough that we don't really need it any more. I don't know if an emulator is really needed but if we don't I can see bug compatibility being a weight around our necks. Eric
