Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

David Woodhouse
2005-12-06T23:03:47Z

On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 22:49 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> The video 'solution' is a combination of digital and analog
> components. Intel defined one end only. Its a bit like AC97 audio only
> as I understand it rather less structured.
>
> Note that most of the BIOS fixes don't replace the BIOS code, they
> provide extra mode table entries to it.

AIUI we can't even add 'extra' mode table entries -- we can only modify
existing entries, and we can't even set the full modeline information on
some systems because we haven't reverse-engineered the tables
completely.

It's done by copying the video BIOS into shadow RAM and modifying the
table in RAM. This isn't really much of an improvement over binary-only
drivers.

--
dwmw2