New video BIOS for bhyve

[John Baldwin]

On 7/19/19 3:02 AM, Henrik Gulbrandsen wrote:
> In the last few months, I have been extending the video support in bhyve
> to allow booting from live ISO images, which sometimes lack UEFI 
> loaders.
> There was already a video BIOS with dormant support for VGA, but I could
> not use that, because the X11 int10 module runs a real-mode x86 emulator
> that aborts when it tries to enter the C code running in protected mode.
> 
> Instead, I added support for PCI Expansion ROMs to bhyve and wrote a new
> SVGA video BIOS from scratch in 8086 assembly code. The current features
> include VGA modes 3 and 12h, 24-bit and 32-bit VESA modes from 640x480 
> to
> 1920x1200, and enough BIOS functions to boot a typical Linux desktop.
> 
> At this point, I think it's good enough for a preliminary release, so if
> you are interested, you will find all patch files at the following URL:
> 
>      https://www.gulbra.net/freebsd-bhyve/
> 
> My apologies for the 15-year-old web layout, which will probably break
> horribly on modern smartphones. Also, I hope I have not duplicated the
> work of someone else. I didn't want to announce this before it worked.

This is pretty impressive work!  Would you be able to post these patches to
a public repository, e.g. on github or gitlab or some such?  That would
really help with review and allow others to assist with the work as well.

-- 
John Baldwin