Re: Issues in implementing VESA support

["Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org>]

On Saturday 15 May 2004 21:49, Shivram Khandeparker wrote:
> 1. What happened to get_vbe_controller_info and get_vbe_mode_info?
>   They dont seem to be there in grub2. Which means il have to rewrite
> them. Which should be just a copy paste from grub legacy.. right? If
> i do write them then where do i put theses functions. In my own files
> or in say startup.s (like vga does) ?

If you need to write an assembly in real mode, startup.S is the right 
place. If you think your code is too big to include it in startup.S, 
you can make another file and have startup.S to include it.

The code in GRUB Legacy is written by me. So you can freely copy it to 
GRUB 2. No problem.

> 2. In my pacth i was using custom a font which was compiled into
> grub. Since the new grub has a font manager i would like to use that
> instead. Could somebody please provide me more info on using this
> font manager, like the kind of font file it uses, does it use bitmap
> fonts . And how do i access the font data once the font file is
> loaded.

There is no documentation for this font manager, so I describe it here 
in brief.

It supports a bitmap font which includes an index table. A font file 
must have this structure:

The 4-byte magic word ("PPF\x7f")
The number of glyphs (little-endian, 4 bytes integer)
An index table
glyphs

An index table consists of entries in this format:

Character code in Unicode (little-endian, 4 bytes integer)
Offset of the glyph from the beginning of the file (little-endian, 4 
bytes integer)

Each glyph is like this:

Width in 8-pixel unit (1 or 2)
Bitmap

For now, the font manager supports only 8x16 and 16x16 font sizes. If 
you don't like this font manager, feel free to make a better one 
yourself.

Once you make a font file, you can use it by the command "font".

Okuji