Re: arch/i386/boot rewrite, and all the hard-coded video cards

Rene Herman
2007-05-01T23:24:31Z

On 05/02/2007 12:41 AM, Vlad wrote:

> H. Peter Anvin wrote:

>> I'm rewriting the i386 setup code in C, instead of assembly,
>> and before I spend a very large amount of time translating
>> all the various card-specific probes, I want to ask the
>> following question...
>>
>> Does *anyone* care about these anymore?
>
> Yes, booting Linux on old i386/i486 hardware is still very useful for
> forensic purposes and recovering important data. I've personally had
> to do this many times, and I'm sure others have as well.
>
> Booting is such a critical process that a user would be completely
> lost as to why it fails, especially if they can't see any output on
> the screen. I think it would be a shame to prevent Linux from running
> on these machines.

He wasn't asking about doing away with all video output on 386/486s, but
with special Super VGA adapter specific modes. You'd have normal VGA
available as always, and VESA if the videocard supports it (which all cards
that _can_ do more than 80x25 do).

Rene.