Re: Finding Aki M Laukkanen's VESAFBD project?

[Antonino Daplas <adaplas@pol.net>]

On Sat, 2003-03-15 at 02:37, Kendall Bennett wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> A long time ago in early 2000, Aki M Laukkanen was a guy working on a 
> VESA framebuffer console daemon for Linux. This driver was structured as 
> a as a user land daemon that the kernel vesafb console driver would call 
> back into once the system was up, allowing the userland VESA driver to 
> use the vm86() service to change modes, program the palette and other 
> useful things that can't be done by the basic VESA driver that uses a 
> mode set previously by LILO or GRUB.

That is a very neat project :-)  It can also be expanded to something
not just the VESA driver will use, but as a general interface whenever
the BIOS services are to be needed.  I can already think several uses
for it (warmboot secondary cards, save/restore current video state,
disable/enable the display, DDC/EDID, etc). I will be very interested if
that project is revived.

BTW:  I want to initialize multiple VGA adapters during the early boot
sequence.  The machine will be in real mode, so there's no such thing as
copy-on-write.  I'm pretty sure it's not possible, but do you know of a
way to disable the BIOS write protection of the C000:0000 segment? 

Tony



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