Re: [RFC] Reliable video POSTing on resume

From: Jon Smirl
Date: Sat Feb 05 2005 - 10:58:16 EST


On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 08:15:35 +0000, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 21:30 -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:
>
> > I suspect the problem in that case is a compressed VBIOS. Some laptops
> > compress the VBIOS and the system BIOS into a single ROM and then
> > expand them at power on. Sounds like this is not happening on resume.
> > To get around the problem copy the image from C000:0 before suspend to
> > a place in preserved RAM where wakeup.S can find it and then copy it
> > back to C000:0 on resume. To test for this checksum C000:0 before
> > suspend and after and see if it has changed.
>
> No, that's not what's happening. If you disassemble the code at
> c000:blah in a laptop, you'll often find that it jumps off to a
> completely different section of address space. During POST, that
> contains video BIOS. After POST, it may be something like USB boot
> support. Without reading it directly out of flash, it's not possible to
> recover that code.

If the copy left at C000:0 is jumping off to F000:xx (system BIOS)
that is a valid thing to do and the reset program may need more
emulation hooks. If it is jumping off somewhere else then I would
consider that a broken VBIOS since jumping to C000:3 for reset is part
of how VGA is supposed to work. If this is happening on an ATI or
Nvidia chip you're probably never going to get video resume working.

--
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@xxxxxxxxx
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