Ramon van Handel wrote:
>
> Jeroen Janssen wrote:
> > > For Linux hosted Plex86 it would be nice to have an Driver
> > > connecting directly to the X-Display. Since you are an
> > > Windows-Specialist
> >
> > Ehmm.. well, I'm no "specialist" in windows display drivers, but
> > I hope I can contribute this way (atleast until I understand more
> > of the (linux) internals of plex86).
>
> You don't have to start directly writing a driver
> for a "real" guest OS... modify one of the demokernels
> to use the fast video facilities that you implement
> as a plugin in plex86, and we can later mold
> the code into a driver shape for guest OSes.
> Initially it's more important that it simply works!
Certainly there should be some test-environment used since
Plex86 presumably will not run the complete guest-OS without
serious trouble.
I would suggest these steps for proceeding on the driver:
1. Define the functionality which will be used by the
driver.
For an display-driver you certanly need something as drawing
lines, rectangles ...
This step can be done without running Plex86, but you should
look at the functions required for an driver in the intended
guest-OS. It would be nice to merge the functionality required
by several OS since this would allow to use much code common
for several drivers.
The result of this step consists in a set of functions at the
host-side which can be called from the guest-side.
2. Implement the host-side functions
3. Take an test-kernel to implement some tests calling the
host-side code generated in step 2.
4. Build a guest-OS-driver
For this step it is virtually required to be able to run the
Guest-OS on Plex86. Presumably it does not make sense to do this
step by emulating the host-side-functions using an native
Windows-Machine.
Elmar
