>>Other options are: play tricks with vm86. Use a cpu emulator. XFree86 4.0
>>does the later to boot secondary vga's for multiheaded displays and initialize
>>vga boards on !ia32 hardware.
> Should I implement an IA32 emulator in the kernel in order to use the
> vesafb video driver with my PC card I have on the alpha?
Yes in 99% cases. If you really want _VESA_fb ...
> Wasn't vesa just a framebuffer mode that should work all over the place?
Yes. As long as "all places" support iX86 real mode...
> I don't care about palette/powersaving and so on. At boot I only want to
> tell the card "switch to graphic mode 778 and allow me write my data to the
> framebuffer".
And VESA standard only supports such thing from iX86 real mode.
> I can't believe I'll have to write an IA32 emulator into the kernel to do
> that (on sane hardware I would achieve the switch with a pair of writel() in
> the MMIO I think).
Correct. But if you want use VESAfb you should play by VESA rules. And VESA
rules (as of VESA 2.0) are simple: the ONLY way to select video mode is to
call specific int from real mode. Sometimes you should even load DOS's driver
to have such ability.
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