Re: Generic VESA framebuffer driver and Video card BOOT?

[Zachary Smith <plinius@comcast.net>]

The problem of x86-only BIOSes is one of the videocard manufacturers'
own making which, in the spirit of good engineering, they should fix
before requiring a downstream kludge.

It's strange that they seem to want to sell these cards for use in
non-x86 machines yet they won't pay to have people write BIOSes
for PPC or other CPUs, or even provide a pseudocode solution.

Zack

Kendall Bennett wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I am writing this email to guage the interest in having code contributed 
> to the main stream Linux kernel that would support the user of a generic, 
> full featured VESA framebuffer driver that works on any CPU architecture 
> along with a generic Video card BOOT or POST mechanism.
> 
> We have been working on a project under contract to ATI that involves 
> porting a version of our SNAPBoot BIOS emulator solution to the PowerPC 
> Linux kernel. The SNAPBoot code supports initialising a graphics card 
> using an x86 BIOS image on any platform (currently tesed on x86, x86-64 
> and PowerPC). Initially SNAPBoot was developed to work across multiple 
> operating systems and CPU architectures from user space, but the desire 
> to use it to initialise the graphics card on embedded PowerPC kernels 
> prompted us to port a version of it for use within the Linux kernel. The 
> version we have ported for use in the kernel can be used to initialise 
> the graphics card for use with any accelerated framebuffer console 
> driver, such as the radeonfb driver which we are currently using it with.
> 
> Note that the SNAPBoot code uses the x86emu BIOS emulator project as the 
> core CPU emulation technology, and project we have been actively involved 
> with for many years since the licensing on the project was changed to 
> MIT/BSD style licensing and incorporated into the XFree86 project. We 
> have built code on top of x86emu to provide generic support for 
> initialising graphics cards on multiple platforms as well as supporting 
> initialisation of modern NonVGA graphics cards (like the ATI Radeon 
> family) without needing access to real VGA resources such as VGA I/O 
> ports and physical memory at 0xA0000-0xBFFFF.
> 
> More importantly we have used SNAPBoot to port our generic VESA SNAP 
> display driver to work on multiple operating systems and platforms, 
> including both x86-64 and PowerPC platforms. Using this driver you can 
> use any graphics card in the machine and it will support all the features 
> provided by the graphics cards VESA BIOS, including support for refresh 
> rate control on cards that support VBE 3.0 services. We have been 
> actively testing both the SNAPBoot capability and the BIOS emulator on 
> many platforms and graphics cards, and the latest version work flawlessly 
> on just about every graphics card we have tested.
> 
> What this means is that it should be possible to build a new version of 
> the VESA framebuffer console driver for the Linux kernel that will have 
> these important features:
> 
> 1. Be able to switch display modes on the fly, supporting all modes 
> enumerated by the Video BIOS.
> 
> 2. Be able to support refresh rate control on graphics cards that support 
> the VBE 3.0 services.
> 
> 3. Be able to support 8-bit and 32-bit display modes on any graphics card 
> on big endian machines (16-bit is not possible unless software rendering 
> code is written to enable endian swapping in software, which may be 
> possible).
> 
> So what we would like to find out is how much interest there might be in 
> both an updated VESA framebuffer console driver as well as the code for 
> the Video card BOOT process being contributed to the maintstream kernel. 
> If there is interest, we would start out by first contributing the core 
> emulator and Video BOOT code, and then work on building a better VESA 
> framebuffer console driver. 
> 
> So what do you guys think? 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> ---
> Kendall Bennett
> Chief Executive Officer
> SciTech Software, Inc.
> Phone: (530) 894 8400
> http://www.scitechsoft.com
> 
> ~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~
> 
> 
> 
> 
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