amd64/94896: Where support VESA Modes for AMD64 kernel ?

[Andrew Reilly]

On Sun, Apr 09, 2006 at 07:05:14PM +0200, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> I don't know what kind of "hi-res console mode" you have
> seen on Gentoo, and I don't know what Gentoo might be doing
> to enable such a thing.  Maybe they have implemented direct
> support for certain graphics hardware (like KGI), or maybe
> they switch to VESA mode before switching to amd64 mode.
> 
> However, there is no way to call the x86 VESA BIOS in amd64
> ("long") mode, because amd64 has no vm86 mode.  It does not
> work, and Gentoo certainly doesn't do that either.

I don't know how Gentoo does it either, but I was thinking
about this the other day, and wondered how possible it might be
to write simple (non-fast) real-mode x86 emulator/interpreter
(which could perhaps be unloaded when finished), just for this
sort of thing.  It wouldn't need to emulate hardware, which is
what takes up a lot of complexity in systems like bochs, because
you want the emulated code to frob the real hardware: that's the
point.

I have a vague recollection that Sun (and Apple?, and DEC?) had
to do this sort of thing for their Sparc and PowerPC systems
when they started building PCI systems around their non-x86
processors.

Might even make ia32 systems neater, because you wouldn't need
to muck about with vm86 mode to get those jobs done.

-- 
Andrew