From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Gerd Knorr Subject: Re: beginnings of allowing more than the basic 80x25 VGAscreen resolution Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2005 16:47:18 +0200 Message-ID: <20050705144718.GB7009@bytesex> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: Jan Beulich Cc: xiaofeng.ling@intel.com, xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org Hi, > First of all, at least grub 0.9x (which is what I think is currently in > wide-spread use) doesn't seem to have even infrastructure to report > video information, not to think about changing the video mode. But I > agree that that'd be the best place for this to live. Distributions have a graphical boot menu, so grub must do some mode switching already. Havn't looked at the grub code, but I think adding that wouldn't be too hard. Might be vanilla grub doesn't do that so you'll have to dig into distribution patches. > Second, simply passing on the multi-boot info to the guest kernel would > still require that the interface between XEN and the guest kernel be > changed. I agree here. > >Text mode is really simple, that is just another screen size > >than 80x25, but completely identical otherwise. Font stuff is > >handled by bios and vga hardware, nothing to worry about here. > > That builds on the assumption that the boot loader actually has the > necessary infrastructure. With the assumption that it's quite far away > from that, I would still think that XEN should try provide the ability > to change modes (at least until the boot loader actually does). I would try to hack grub (or syslinux, Tim's multiboot loader is merged upstream ;) instead of adding a temporary solution to xen. YMMV. > Once XEN is so stable that you can afford not seeing its initial > messages, leaving the screen alone when in graphics mode is certainly an > option. But I don't think that's an option right now. For hacking on xen having a serial console is a great thing. My xen devel machine doesn't even have a monitor connected ;) Gerd -- panic("it works"); /* avoid being flooded with debug messages */