Re: vesafb terminal for testing.

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Sunday 14 August 2005 13:52, Vesa Jääskeläinen wrote:
> I have attached patch here that adds simple terminal that uses VESA BIOS
> Extension 2.0+ for rendering terminal. It is not meant to be included as
> is in GRUB 2, but I would hope that people would test it, so I could try
> to improve it for greater compatibility (even though I have tried to
> follow the standards, there might be some glitches between
> implementations).

That's great. I will try once I finish my current task.

> First one is that there should be common virtual terminal for all arch's
> and then separate graphics drivers that will do the actual drawing. In
> this patch this is all implemented in one module and it is not as pretty
> as it could be.

Another way is to emulate VBE on other architectures... Actually, some 
firmware (such as CFE) follows this way (e.g. CFE emulates PC's VGA BIOS).

> Second one is that this patch uses VGA BIOS fonts to draw characters and
> it might cause some problems in some cards.

You should use the font manager to render characters, like the VGA terminal. 
Getting fonts from the BIOS is the last resort.

> Third one is that there are some testing functionality (vbe_test,
> vbe_list_modes) in same module, what would be best place to move those?

I think they should be in the directory commands. These may be useful even 
when the user does not use a framebuffer terminal, because Multiboot 
Specification also requires VBE support.

> Now how to get started on testing:
> - insmod vesafb
> - Use vbe_list_modes to find mode number (eg. 0x111) that you want to use.
> - set vbe_mode varible ('set vbe_mode=0x111')
>
> To test mode:
> - vbe_test
>
> To use it in terminal:
> - insmod terminal
> - terminal vesafb

Thank you for your description. Can we have your code in the CVS? It's easier 
to test, once it is merged, because we do not have to care about conflicts.

Okuji