Re: Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] VGA BIOS source code

[Kyle Hayes <kyle@silverbeach.net>]

On Monday 31 May 2004 13:17, Bartosz Fabianowski wrote:
> Alright, after digging into QEMU's graphics card emulation and into the
> VGA BIOS source, I came to a few conclusions:
>
> a) SDD 6.53 is doing something utterly wrong. [snip]
>
> c) [snip] The entire VESA VBE
> implementation is rather broken, shaky and incomplete.
>
> b) The way the graphics card is emulated by QEMU (and Bochs and plex86
> for that matter) is totally inefficient, error-prone and overly
> complicated. [snip]

Is there a reasons for the a c b ordering?

I think you are probably a little harsh on this code.  It may be far from 
perfect, but it does (mostly) work.

> d) Finally, as a conclusion from a) to c), I believe it would be best to
> ditch the entire VGA BIOS and implement all functions of the graphics
> card in C, natively, inside QEMU. This will be more efficient and less
> error prone. Now, I haven't seen the patches mentioned by Fabrice that
> emulate a CLGD54xx. But I certainly hope it is all native and not a
> half-native half-emulated solution like the current one.

Getting something in place that pretends to be a known chipset and that can 
act like a dumb framebuffer would probably help.  That seems to be the 
direction that Fabrice and Co. are going.  

The Cirrus Logic chipset sounds like a good one for this.  

Best,
Kyle