Re: [Qemu-devel] Cirrus bugs vs endian: how two bugs cancel each other out

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Tue, 2012-07-31 at 18:44 +1000, ronnie sahlberg wrote:
> 
> I use lots of guests that will never ever get virtio drivers.
> So for those guests, any work on making sure bog standard vga keeps
> working or even improving it
> gets two thumbs up from me!

So I've been essentially restarting my work to make it a virtio-vga...
however, you don't have to use the virtio channel to set modes & do VBE
etc... so it should work like vga std for a dumb x86 guest using
VBE/BIOS.

I'm hoping to have something to show later this week.

I've also done it like the other virtio drivers in that the PCI
interface is split from the core so it can accomodate a non-PCI virtio
base.

The main difference with the other virtio ones is that it has APIs to
return MemoryRegion's for the linear fb and registers, which the
virtio-pci stub hooks up to BARs but that can be hooked up elsewhere
easily.  

The main thing to do right now to have parity of functionality with vga
std is the modified vbe bios, which I'll toy with tomorrow (ugh .. x86
asm :-) From there, I can start doing things with the virtio channel
(right now it exists but I don't have any request implemented).

I'm thinking about a trivial 2D blitter (based on earlier work posted in
2009 by Alex Graf), maybe a HW cursor, see if I can get that used by
SLOF and do a fbdev driver (or rather a drmfb driver).

>From there, I think the right approach is to sync with the folks working
on virtio-qxl so they can use that pipe for spice & we don't re-invent
that wheel.

Cheers,
Ben.