Simon Geard wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 13:25 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
>> Simon Geard wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2010-06-29 at 10:25 -0500, al...@verizon.net wrote:
>> You were ok up to here...
>
> A combination of trying to simplify, and trying to remember stuff I last
> played with in college, back when accelerated graphics add-on cards were
> a rarity... :)
Yes, it's been a while, hasn't it :-)
>> That font is implemented in ROM inside the graphics controller, not
>> the BIOS. To get access to it, one simply has to command the controller
>> to use it. If one does that, the boot screen content usually magically
>> reappears, unless one also switches to a different RAM page for display,
>> or if some frame buffer mode was used during boot.
>
> Ok, so that stuff is on the video card, not the motherboard?
It's inside the video processor itself, usually. Whether that be mounted
on the MB or on a separate card it's not part of the BIOS (EE)ROM.
> Nevertheless, the point was more to do with the two ways of talking to
> that controller - either by treating it as an modern NVidia card (as
> Nouveau does), or as an antique VGA chip (as the BIOS does). And the
> latter isn't consistent with Nouveau's purpose in providing the former.
Apparently, it's the stated non-goal to support switching back
by the authors (or at least owners) of the driver.
So, unless he's willing to get the source for the driver, and
rewrite portions of it himself, there's not going to be a way
to "go back".
The kinds of technique of installing special fonts is the only
reasonably easy way forward toward his goal. Even then, the
boot messages aren't going to come back, unless he writes some
special driver code to read the RAM for the text page(s) which
contain them, and then issue commands to redraw the active
graphics page that content using the appropriate font.
None of this seems worth the effort, to me. However, it's not
my system nor my time.
Mike
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