Messages in this thread | | | From | "Adam J. Richter" <> | Date | Sun, 12 Dec 1999 16:35:01 -0800 | Subject | Re: Calling VESA BIOS routines from kernel? |
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Egbert Eich <eich@hilbert.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de> writes:
>Speaking for XFree86 we already read out DDC and I'm working on >the autoconfiguration stuff for 4.x (x==0?).
I am familiar with your excellent code in the current 3.9.16 XFree86 snapshot in xc/programs/Xserver/hw/ddc. I have seen it work on a number of hardware configurations. Thank you very much for writing it.
I also appreciate the fact that you wrote it reasonably modularly, so that it can be adapted to parsing DDC information extracted from the VESA video BIOS. Having the X server talk to the hardware to read DDC information is the most direct approach and adds portability to running PC video cards on non-x86 platforms, so I am glad that you wrote that too, but it will probably take at least another year for developers to write and integrate DDC controls for all of the different video cards for XFree86 (currently, 3.9.16 only supports DDC on some S3 chips, right?). So, I think that using your code to extract the data from the VESA BIOS and generating configuration files for X and svgalib from that will be more widely applicable in the meantime.
I am glad to hear that it is possible to call the VESA BIOS extensions from Linux, and it is even better news that it apparently does not require additional kernel modifications. My intention in using the kernel was only to do what I thought had to be done in the kernel (do strange things with interrupts and descriptor tables, etc.) and pass back the raw data. If this lrmi package can do it entirely from user mode, that is better.
By the way, my efforts to track down your softbooter software have turned up nothing and my efforts to track down lrmi have turned up a few different versions, but none that I am sure is the latest official version. http://userweb.interactive.net/~joshv/lrmi-0.6.tar.gz is the closest thing that I see to an official version, but I see that svgalib-1.4.0 includes a modified version of this and ddcprobe in RedHat-6.1 and Spiro (inherited from RedHat?) include files from it as well. I would greatly appreciate a URL's for the distribution points of either of these packages and would be happy to offer FTP space if that would help.
Thanks again for writing the DDC parsing and control code. I hope to get this stuff integrated into our boot time hardware autoconfiguration process (ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/private/adam/pnpboards-beta-2.tar.gz) to support automatic adaptation to a monitor upgrade.
Adam J. Richter __ ______________ 4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 104 adam@yggdrasil.com \ / San Jose, California 95129-1034 +1 408 261-6630 | g g d r a s i l United States of America fax +1 408 261-6631 "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."
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