Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Fix curses on big endian hosts

[Blue Swirl]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Aurelien Jarno <address@hidden> wrote:
> On big endian hosts, the curses interface is unusable: the emulated
> graphic card only displays garbage, while the monitor interface displays
> nothing (or rather only spaces).
>
> The curses interface is waiting for data in native endianness, so
> console_write_ch() should not do any conversion. The conversion should
> be done when reading the video buffer in hw/vga.c. I supposed this
> buffer is in little endian mode, though it's not impossible that the
> data is actually in guest endianness. I currently have no big endian
> guest to way (they all switch to graphic mode immediately).

First versions of OpenBIOS for Sparc64 used text console, I switched
to VBE frame buffer later.

I'm also puzzled by the uses of TARGET_WORDS_BIGENDIAN in
hw/vga_template.h. I'd suppose that VGA (especially PCI devices) would
be always little endian, so why the checks?