Re: Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] VGA BIOS source code

[Fabrice Bellard <fabrice@bellard.org>]

Bartosz Fabianowski wrote:
>> Is there a reasons for the a c b ordering?
> 
> 
> No ;)
> 
>> I think you are probably a little harsh on this code.  It may be 
>> far from perfect, but it does (mostly) work.
> 
> 
> Yes, it does work. Maybe I was a bit harsh in my wording after 
> wasting a day on it, sorry.

Yes, and if you think about it longer, you will see the benefit of the
Bochs VESA VBE layer. It is one of the simplest implementation
you can think of.

The VMware driver idea is just an extension of it to add some
acceleration primitives, and of course it is much more complicated.
Adding real hardware support (such as a Cirrus Logic VGA card) will also
be more complicated than the Bochs VESA VBE layer.

> Since my main interest is in running Windows inside QEMU, I could 
> also envision adding another driver later, similar to what is done in
> VMWare. It would be a windows driver that acts as a dumb stub and 
> forwards every request to the dumb side. Since it would be designed 
> from the ground up only for QEMU, it could be limited in its
> functionality to really only being a frame buffer and nothing else.
> This would probably accelerate the emulation quite a bit.

It is already done for NT (read the faq), at least for a linear frame 
buffer.

Fabrice.