Re: Generic VESA framebuffer driver and Video card BOOT?

[Ian Romanick <idr@us.ibm.com>]

Zachary Smith wrote:

> This is a problem of the videocard manufacturers' making which,
> in the spirit of good engineering, they should fix before requiring
> a downstream kludge.
> 
> Specifically, ATI, rather than advocate x86 emulation in order
> to use their BIOS on non-x86 machines, should put a pseudocode BIOS
> (something like java bytecode) in the ROM instead, including
> an interpreter of course, perhaps gutting the x86 BIOS calls to use the
> pseudocode routines so there is only one version to maintain.
> And provide an entrypoint for non-x86 CPUs.

Isn't that basically what OpenFirmware is?  I think part of the issue is 
the x86 compiled BIOS is smaller than the OF BIOS, so they use smaller 
(i.e., cheaper) flash on the card.  That has prevented people from 
re-flashing PC cards with OF images from Mac cards.

I think Digital had the right idea from the beginning:  put the x86 BIOS 
emulator in the system firmware and be done with it.


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