Re: vbetool on pure AMD64 system

Alan Cox
2005-11-14T21:48:27Z

On Llu, 2005-11-14 at 12:02 -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
> When you say that vm86 is not supported on x86-64, what do you mean
> exactly? I'm pretty sure that the hardware supports it, and I don't see
> how the vesa frame buffer Xorg driver works without it. If the hardware
> supports v86 mode, why wouldn't the kernel?

The hardware supports vm86 mode only if the OS is in 32bit mode. Its
conceptually possible to support this in a 64bit OS but it would be very
very hairy code and very hard to make secure or correct. Feel free to
try it.

Xorg has a software x86 emulator that is very basic but sufficient to
boot most but not all video bioses on all sorts of systems. It uses that
on x86-64.

Alan