Status of vbe and vesa implementation

[Durand Miller]

Hi,

About a week ago, I was shown the vbe part of the Multiboot specification.
Browsing through the code, I saw that the vbe flags are mostly ignored and
the features not implemented.  I also noticed that one of the bugs (bug
#510) noted on the grub website include a "Reconsider the VBE support".

Part of my interest in this has to do with the fact that I have operating
system development as one of my hobbies and the vbe support of grub would
help me out quite a lot. I'm not alone in this though; there are many new
people who get stuck on the vesa support when messing around with os dev.
However, I don't think this feature will have much support outside of
hobbiest developing since all major os's have graphics drivers already and I
think this absence of need has caused this feature to be put aside for a
while.

So what I've done is add two more functions to builtins.c and modified the
boot procedure to check to for vbe request in the multiboot header, set the
correct or close-enough mode and pass this information along in the
multiboot information structure.  It all works and it's only a few lines of
code.

I just wanted to know if there is any point in submitting a patch if the VBE
support is possibly going to change.

I would also be interested in working further on this...

Durand Miller