rdos wrote:
Griwes wrote:
As far as I was observing what Windows (8 at least) does at boot, it first changes mode into something lower than my max resolution (probably 1024x768), and I think that's because it wants to have ANY video mode before loading device drivers. And STAYS in it if there is none. I'm fairly sure it doesn't use crazy magic of 8086 emulation to do just that. In theory, that's why you have VBE/UEFI video protocols - to set up something temporary in easy way, and fall back to using it longer if you have no drivers for present hardware.
So, rdos, you just went full of retard.
64-bit Windows no longer supports running the command shell in text-mode because it cannot use V86 mode to call the video-BIOS to change modes. And when the protected mode VBE interface is buggy (and thus unusable), they have no other choice.
Thus, this idea that you cannot change video-mode dynamically is not a design-feature, rather a consequence of bad design-choices by hardware manufacturers and BIOS developpers.
rdos wrote:
While I know this is part of UEFI, I don't think the boot-loader should mess with VBE modes. That task should be left to the device-driver that handles VBE. For instance, I'll refuse to accept the idea that video mode should be setup at boot time, and I will keep my functionality to dynamically change video mode as much as possible, and letting the VBE driver emulate video-mode changes (particulary text mode) only if absolutely necessary.
Oh, so now you disagree with yourself.
Also, it's rather natural that you cannot change the video mode dynamically if you don't have video drivers; both BIOS and UEFI need specific execution environments, that just cannot be kept endlessly. It's rather a technical impossibility to have a graphic-card agnostic way to change video mode dynamically... unless you make graphic card manufacturers to create common standard MMIO interface, which they won't for obvious reasons.