Subject: Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario
From: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
To: Brian Gerst <bgerst@didntduck.org>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>,
       William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>,
       Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
In-Reply-To: <4394696B.6060008@didntduck.org>
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	 <20051206030828.GA823@opteron.random>  <4394696B.6060008@didntduck.org>
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Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 18:42:55 +0000
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On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 11:23 -0500, Brian Gerst wrote:
> Intel?  That's all nice and dandy if and only if you have an Intel
> CPU.   Not an option for AMD users, for obvious reasons.

Actually even the Intel support isn't particularly good. We don't have
proper mode setup code -- we have to invoke the BIOS to do mode setup,
and we can't set specific modelines (like PAL-compatible modes); we're
limited to what the BIOS knows about -- it's like vesafb with
acceleration.

There's some work on reverse-engineering the BIOS so that you can
hackishly poke 'new' modes into its tables, but it's still not a very
good option.

-- 
dwmw2


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