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Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2010 20:10:27 +0100
From: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Fix curses on big endian hosts
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To: Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>
Cc: qemu-devel@nongnu.org

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 05:42:43PM +0000, Blue Swirl wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> wrote:
> > On big endian hosts, the curses interface is unusable: the emulated
> > graphic card only displays garbage, while the monitor interface displays
> > nothing (or rather only spaces).
> >
> > The curses interface is waiting for data in native endianness, so
> > console_write_ch() should not do any conversion. The conversion should
> > be done when reading the video buffer in hw/vga.c. I supposed this
> > buffer is in little endian mode, though it's not impossible that the
> > data is actually in guest endianness. I currently have no big endian
> > guest to way (they all switch to graphic mode immediately).
> 
> First versions of OpenBIOS for Sparc64 used text console, I switched
> to VBE frame buffer later.

Do you know if it is easy to switch back to text console? That would be
an easy way to check what is correct.

> I'm also puzzled by the uses of TARGET_WORDS_BIGENDIAN in
> hw/vga_template.h. I'd suppose that VGA (especially PCI devices) would
> be always little endian, so why the checks?
> 

I also don't explain them. I have tried to remove them, and powerpc and
sparc target still seems to work.

-- 
Aurelien Jarno	                        GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
aurelien@aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net