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[Qemu-devel] vgabios + qemu: issues and plans.


From: Gerd Hoffmann
Subject: [Qemu-devel] vgabios + qemu: issues and plans.
Date: Wed, 05 May 2010 15:38:21 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100330 Fedora/3.0.4-1.fc12 Thunderbird/3.0.4

  Hi,

Today we have two vgabios versions in qemu: The standard one (vgabios.bin) and the cirrus one (vgabios-cirrus.bin).

The cirrus vgabios is a PCI ROM. We can (and do) load it into the ROM PCI bar. The vgabios checks the pci config space to figure where the linear framebuffer (for vesa graphics) is mapped to. It knows how to program the cirrus.

The standard bios isn't a PCI ROM. We have to load it using the seabios firmware interface. It expects to find the linear framebuffer at the magic address 0xe0000000. It uses the bochs extentions to implement vesa graphics support.

So, what is wrong with this?

First, I'd like to be able to load the vgabios via PCI ROM bar on all pci vga cards (stdvga, vmware, soon qxl). The PCI ID in the bios has to match the PCI ID of the card, so we'll need a bunch of vga bios binaries, all identical except for the PCI ID. Or we need some kind of binary patching. Otherwise seabios will not load them from the PCI ROM bar.

Second, I want to get rid of the magic address 0xe0000000 (except for isa-vga). This is basically just a matter of updating to vgabios version 0.6c. And this needs one vga bios binary per vga card too as the PCI ID is used to lookup the card (and then the framebuffer address) in PCI config space.

Comments? Especially on the binary patching? Worth it? Or just build a bunch of binaries? They are not *that* big after all ...

cheers,
  Gerd




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