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Re: Framebuffer console support for i386 and amd64



Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Jared D. McNeill 
<jmcneill%invisible.ca@localhost> wrote:
Hey folks --

My goal is to nuke vesafb, and replace it with genfb in the i386 and amd64
kernels. This is a prereq to having proper splash screen support. I would
like to check in the following changes to the x86 bootloader and kernel. Any
objections?

 http://www.invisible.ca/~jmcneill/outgoing/x86fb/

With the above changes and the proper options in your kernel config, you can
select a framebuffer mode in the bootloader by doing 'vesa modenum', so a
boot.cfg entry would look like this for eg. 640x480x8:

 menu=Boot NetBSD:vesa 0x101;boot netbsd

Where do these 0x101 and similar numbers come from?  Linux also uses
them (dunno if with the same format) and I always found them very
confusing.  Couldn't we just give a string such as 640x480x8 and parse
it?  (where parsing could simply be a mapping table from known valid
strings to numbers)

They are part of the VESA VBE specification. I have added a 'vesa list' command that dumps available mode numbers, it certainly wouldn't be a problem to support WxHxD style either. I do plan on adding VBE/DDC support so 'vesa on' will select the native display resolution instead of 640x480x8, but I'm not quite there yet.

Cheers,
Jared


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