> On Sun, 12 Dec 1999, Gerd Knorr wrote:
>
> >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?
Probably yes. I don't have another idea for something /generic/.
Of course there is option to use matroxfb/atyfb/whatever if a native
framebuffer driver exists for your hardware...
> Wasn't vesa just a framebuffer mode that should work all over the
> place?
vesafb is a very simple fb driver. It expects to find a initialized vga
and the information "framebuffer memory starts at adress foo, video mode
is 800x600 at 16 bpp". The initialization is done using the VESA bios by
the real mode startup code.
On PPC (+sparc?) offb does much the same: Video is initialized by Open
Firmware, offb just uses the configured video mode.
Gerd
-- sigfault
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