Re: Normal mode patch

[Marco Gerards]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden> writes:

> I forgot to answer this issue...
> 
> On Wednesday 31 December 2003 18:24, Marco Gerards wrote:
> > gianluca (I don't remember his real name) told me on IRC that it
> > crashes whenever the console scrolls.  I was able to reproduce this.
> > It is not clear what still needs to be done to get the graphics
> > console to work.  If it is not a lot of work I can do that, I have
> > quite some experience with VGA programming.
> 
> You are right. There is a big problem when scrolling the menu. Probably 
> it is due to a wrong calculation of a memory pointer, but I'm not sure 
> where it is. As you see, the code is a bit ugly, so it might be better 
> to clean up the code more or less before diving into the problem 
> seriously.

Ok, I can do that someday.

> What is difficult here is that once the bug appears, your console 
> becomes almost useless. So using a serial interface or somehow 
> extending bochs would be necessary. bochs + gdb is generally a good 
> solution, but I'm afraid that this combination is unusable with PUPA, 
> because PUPA uses dynamic modules at run time. 

Would it be possible to extend PUPA with a gdb stub?

> Once this kind of bugs are fixed, I'm really interested in making a very 
> fancy menu interface using VGA or VESA. This would make the unofficial 
> graphics patch for GRUB completely obsolete. :)

Do you mean with this "kind of bug"?  The crash or making it easier to
debug?

What is the reason why you wrote this VGA driver?  For portability?

It is possible to show unicode characters in VGA text mode.  The new
Hurd console works like this.

Thanks,
Marco