[olpc-software] Which BIOS will OLPC have ?

[Jim Gettys]

On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 10:55 -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 10:14:12AM -0400, Jim Gettys wrote:
> org for the older chips at least in part uses the VESA emulation (which 
> encapsulates chunks of the video circuitry knowledge). That area doesn't
> look problematic as the OLPC has a fixed video arrangement and also has its
> own rather unusual video design.

Actually, Xorg is willing (potentially) to work with either VESA or
fbdev, and we don't have the problem of an outboard video BIOS to deal
with the way you do with some graphics cards, so we have no need to use
VESA for X support.

We'll have to add DCON support to an fbdev driver.  This will be a fun
piece of work.  

On the agenda: if the X server is idle for a while, we may want to turn
over display to the DCON, and turn off the video output (lower power
that way: the video output and memory accesses use power), vary the
refresh rate depending on screen activity (again, lower power when
running slowly), and, of course, make sure suspend and resume is
blindingly fast.

And an fbdev driver that may work on GX2 recently went into Linus'
tree :-). Hopefully it will be a good starting point.  Anyone who wants
to test that driver please do.  Ron tried a bit on Friday in LinuxBIOS
under Linux as bootloader; the base register for graphics may not be
getting initialized and he got garbage on the screen.  It is likely the
Insyde BIOS already initializes the base register (otherwise, we'd not
be seeing messages), so trying under Linux booted from Insyde would
provide interesting data.
                                 Regards,
                                    - Jim

               
-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child