Why VESA and DPMS are available only for i386?

[Carlos A. M. dos Santos]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Xin LI <delphij at delphij.net> wrote:
> Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Several PRs were closed based on the argument that FreeBSD/amd64
>> cannot call to the VESA BIOS. XFree86 solved this problem by means of
>> the INT10 module. I believe that it would be possible to do the same
>> on the FreeBSD kernel.
>>
>> Is there any ongoing effort to enable the VESA kernel moule on
>> non-i386 platform? Is there any particular difficulty for doing this,
>> besides depending on VM86?
>>
> According to VESA's VBE 3.0 standard, there is a "Protected Mode Entry
> Point" [optionally] provided by BIOS, which OS or application is
> supposed to copy to a place where it is writable.  The code there would
> be written in 16-bit protected mode.  Therefore I think it's do-able...
>
> http://www.vesa.org/public/VBE/vbe3.pdf
>
> Cheers,

I'm reading the specification and digging at the code of the X server
and the X VESA driver. Look promising.

-- 
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/life
make clean