Re: [9fans] hardware acceleration

[George Michaelson <ggm@dstc.edu.au>]

The relative importance of something like VESA isn't running it
permanently: its being able to use it to bootstrap.

Nigel offered to help me get a G400 working. I couldn't get his
mods into a floppy, and get it to work, not the least because the
boot/install floppy is already near max size, and because frankly,
the install process is baroque.

If I'd been able to use a VESA mode driver to get to a running state
however slow, slipping his mods in would have been trivial.

As a put-off to newbies, install is a big one. And if you discount
flamage about the relative merits of Paris to Pennsylvania a really
large number of Qs in the mail seem to be about making p9 work on
hardware that is both modern, easy to buy, and demonstrably working
(albiet from arcane and crude codehacks) for other s/w systems.

I do sympathise with people who have to cut this code saying that
its not a 100% solution, but the current one is way below 80:20 and
could (I suspect) with VESA be a lot closer.

If you look at the circumstances of a P9 newbie, its increasingly
unlikely they will have the hardware specs in the install page. So
this problem only gets worse.

How about writing it to drive off the serial port, and bypassing the
screen altogether for some level of bootstrap?

-George