Re: [RFC] Reliable video POSTing on resume

From: Ondrej Zary
Date: Sat Feb 05 2005 - 06:57:09 EST


Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 21:30 -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:


I suspect the problem in that case is a compressed VBIOS. Some laptops
compress the VBIOS and the system BIOS into a single ROM and then
expand them at power on. Sounds like this is not happening on resume.
To get around the problem copy the image from C000:0 before suspend to
a place in preserved RAM where wakeup.S can find it and then copy it
back to C000:0 on resume. To test for this checksum C000:0 before
suspend and after and see if it has changed.


No, that's not what's happening. If you disassemble the code at
c000:blah in a laptop, you'll often find that it jumps off to a
completely different section of address space. During POST, that
contains video BIOS. After POST, it may be something like USB boot
support. Without reading it directly out of flash, it's not possible to
recover that code.

I wonder how this can work:
a motherboard with i815 chipset (integrated VGA), Video BIOS is integrated into system BIOS
a PCI card inserted into one of the PCI slots, configured as primary in system BIOS

During POST, the PCI card BIOS is initialized. I boot Windows 98SE - then the onboard VGA initializes and I can use 2 monitors.
So either:
1. The driver can initialize the onboard VGA on its own (without VGA BIOS)
or
2. There is a way how to get the onboard VGA BIOS code from system BIOS


--
Ondrej Zary
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