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Subject: Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario
From: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Brian Gerst <bgerst@didntduck.org>, Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>,
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Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 23:03:41 +0000
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On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 22:49 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> The video 'solution' is a combination of digital and analog
> components. Intel defined one end only. Its a bit like AC97 audio only
> as I understand it rather less structured. 
> 
> Note that most of the BIOS fixes don't replace the BIOS code, they
> provide extra mode table entries to it.

AIUI we can't even add 'extra' mode table entries -- we can only modify
existing entries, and we can't even set the full modeline information on
some systems because we haven't reverse-engineered the tables
completely.

It's done by copying the video BIOS into shadow RAM and modifying the
table in RAM. This isn't really much of an improvement over binary-only
drivers.

-- 
dwmw2