On 27/03/13 16:43, Artyom Tarasenko wrote:
So as a stepping stone, should we create an FCode ROM for TCX?
Sounds reasonable to me, but
- afaik the current TCX implementation is written in C, no Forth. So
maybe it's easier to keep the current implementation in OpenBIOS and
just add some kind of auto-detection.
- I'm not a graphic guy. :) I run qemu -nographic whenever possible.
So I'd wait till someone from the graphic side comments on it.
Blue? Mark?
I'm actually slightly ahead of you here. Take a look at my OpenBIOS
console patchset I posted a couple of weeks ago, and in particular this
patch:
http://www.openfirmware.info/pipermail/openbios/2013-March/007491.html.
Both tcx.fs and vga.fs were deliberately designed so that with minimum
effort they can be converted to an Fcode payload suitable for a display
device, similar to as mentioned here:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/806-1379-10/displydv.html.
The minor downside is that we'd have to specify fcode-utils as a
dependency for building the resulting Fcode images, but that's not
insurmountable.
So yes, if QEMU are happy to host the FCode binaries then it would be
great if we could specify the SPARC cg3 framebuffer using something like:
-device cg3,rom=QEMU,cg3.bin
Obviously the in-built QEMU,cg3.bin would be the default file if rom=
was not specified, but it means that people booting using real SUN OBP
images can point to a real SUNW Fcode display ROM and use that if
desired with the same patch.
ATB,
Mark.
