Why VESA and DPMS are available only for i386?

[Carlos A. M. dos Santos]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Jung-uk Kim <jkim at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Monday 15 September 2008 05:22 am, Oliver Fromme wrote:
>> Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote:
>>  > Xin LI wrote:
>>  > > Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote:
>>  > > > 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
>>  >
>>  > I'm reading the specification and digging at the code of the X
>>  > server and the X VESA driver. Look promising.
>>
>> Don't hold your breath.  Peter explained that this is more
>> involved than it seems at first glance:
>>
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/2005-October/00637
>>6.html
>>
>> Here's a quote:
>>   |  [FreeBSD's VESA code] is trying to use bios calls to change
>>   | the modes.  This is something a 64 bit kernel cannot do.  To
>>   | make this work, one would have to trampoline out of 64 bit mode
>>   | and into 32 bit mode, then do the vm86 or bios32() calls.  This
>>   | is more work than it might appear at first because you have to
>>   | deal with interrupts.  One would have to write a 32 bit
>>   | mini-kernel that can accept interrupts and traps, trampoline to
>>   | 64 bit mode, handle them, then return, switching back to 32 bit
>>   | mode.  All with page tables etc.  And of course you have to do
>>   | extra data copying and have a way to describe it to the API.
>>
>> By the way, It doesn't matter whether you use the VESA
>> BIOS' real-mode functions or the protected-mode functions
>> (which exist since VBE 2.0, not only 3.0).  From the view
>> of an amd64 kernel it doesn't make a difference.
>>
>> Another way would be to write a 32bit x86 instruction
>> emulator (similar to what programs like qemu or bochs do),
>> so you can execute the VESA functions within an emulated
>> virtual machine that programs the VGA hardware registers.
>> This isn't exactly trivial either.  Note that there are
>> already such emulators, but I'm not aware of a BSD-licensed
>> one that could be included in the FreeBSD kernel without
>> problems.
>
> doscmd(1) had a rudimentary 16-bit CPU emulation:
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/projects/doscmd/
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/projects/doscmd/cpu.c

No change in the last 4 years. Is there anybody responsible for it these days?


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