Re: Framebuffer console support for i386 and amd64

["Julio M. Merino Vidal" <jmmv84%gmail.com@localhost>]

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)

Cheers,

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84%gmail.com@localhost>