Re: [9fans] changes on sources

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

> so what are the current tested configurations these days?

The collective 9fans crowd knows more than I do about that.
There were a few issues with the E820 maps and one bug in
the Neomagic video driver, but Jim and I have fixed them.

Everything that worked before should still work.  The real issue
is vesa.  I had a few reports of people not being able to use vesa
with the April kernels on certain machines.  I don't expect the
current kernels to fix those problems.  (There were also reports
of not being able to use Mach64 cards in non-vesa mode, and
I did fix that.)

I didn't intend to put vesa in just yet, but It happened that
when I cleaned up the pc mmu code, I needed to change all
the vga code to understand the difference between virtual
and physical addresses.  I had already done that particular
cleanup in the vesa code, so I just picked those up.  The vesa
code is as tested as it was back in April, which is as tested as
people here were able to.  Now that it's in the default kernel
I hope that it will get more testing.  As I said above, it shouldn't
non-vesa configurations should be unaffected.

People are running the kernel on terminals at Bell Labs with
no problems, but they're not using vesa since they all had
supported hardware before.

I booted the latest Plan 9 on my Thinkpad X40 last night and
it just worked, using vesa (Intel 82852/855GM graphics chip).

In the cheaper, so-called integrated chipsets,
which use system memory for video memory, I wonder if
the kernel is trying to use the memory as real memory
at the same time that the vesa bios is trying to use it
as video memory.  The E820 map should have helped
this, not made it worse, but who knows.

Russ