Re: Building vgabios-stdvga.bin

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>]

  Hi,

> I noticed that there's a directory, kvm/vgabios, in the distribution
> which appears to have source code for the relevant targets.  Indeed,
> one of the source files there, vbetables-gen.c, seems to be the one
> I need to modify to add my new display resolutions.  Great.
> So naturally, I tried to run a make there, but it wanted to use bcc.

Thats the one qemu is using.  Also available from
    http://git.qemu.org/?p=vgabios.git;a=summary

> With this questionable version of dev86, I went back to the kvm/vgabios
> directory and tried to build there again.  Much to my surprise, it
> actually ran, and built 4 variants on VGABIOS-lgpl-latest.bin...
> Cool, says I, now what do I do with these?  I did the only thing
> I could think of, and installed VGA-lgpl-latest.bin as

Almost correct.  You need VGABIOS-lgpl-latest.stdvga.bin

> Of course, what this thing really needs is a way for us to configure,
> at runtime, the available resolutions.  I have no idea how hard that
> would be, but we're obviously not there now.

There is some work in progress to put the vgabios included in
seabios.git into better shape, which hopefully gives us a vgabios which
does (a) does not require dev86 to build and (b) is almost completely c
code not assembler and thus much easier to hack.

There is a communication channel between seabios & qemu already
(fw_cfg), that could be used by vgabios too to get non-standard screen
resolutions configured at runtime.

cheers,
  Gerd