From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] hardware acceleration In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 13 Feb 2001 19:45:01 EST." <20010214004507.48578199D5@mail.cse.psu.edu> Message-ID: <20550.982112882@dstc.edu.au> From: George Michaelson Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 11:08:02 +1000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 62dd320c-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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