OSDev.org

Hello! How to enter graphics mode in protected mode without bios and grub? It will be cool if I can get 1920x1200 resolution. Thanks!
Update
Ok, I see I can't do this well without bios.

reload wrote:Hello! How to enter graphics mode in protected mode without bios and grub? It will be cool if I can get 1920x1200 resolution. Thanks!

If you want a resolution like 1920x1200 you will probably have to write your own graphics driver which is a massive task.

Yes, it won't be easy. But how can I setup graphics at all?

Short answer you cannot.

Long answer http://wiki.osdev.org/Category:Video

If you never plan on using real H/W Bochs provides a VBE that is easy to use in PMode. http://wiki.osdev.org/Bochs_VBE_Extensions

you cannot.

Why? Linus Torvalds done this.

That's why it is the short answer.

It is possible but it will require either Real-Mode for SVGA or a driver for the card in question - which most have NO information available

You can also do VGA modes from PMode, 320x200x256, 640x480x16, etc. but not the high resolutions you are looking for.

So I need to setup Video mode before seting up PM, right?

reload wrote:So I need to setup Video mode before seting up PM, right?

Or exit PM, or use V86.

But you may or may not be provided with the resolution you are looking for, you are limited to what the manufacturer placed in their video card bios

check out the following
http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int-10.htm
http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-0266.htm
http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-0267.htm
http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-0268.htm
http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-0269.htm

Note this is all Real-Mode BIOS commands.

reload wrote:

you cannot.

Why? Linus Torvalds done this.

No, he didn't.

BIOS and EFI are the only methods to set video modes that are oblivious to the exact video card used. If you refuse to use them, you'll have to pick every video card you want to support in turn and write a driver for it manually.

And no, Torvalds did not add video support at all. Long story short is that NVidia, ATI, Intel, Broadcom and the whole lot of graphics manufacturers write their own because Linux is too big not to support.

reload wrote:

you cannot.

Why? Linus Torvalds done this.

Nope, he just said "Nvidia, f*ck you".

Hi,

reload wrote:

you cannot.

Why? Linus Torvalds done this.

Originally Linus didn't bother with usable video card drivers at all and only supported text mode.

To fix that, people (Xorg, SVGAlib) built video drivers into user-space. Of course that sucked (when something crashed the kernel couldn't restore the video card's state or anything because the kernel has no usable video drivers). People put up with this retarded hackery for about 15 years.

To fix that, eventually people tried putting video mode setting into the kernel. There were a few attempts at doing this before it became "accepted practice". Of course that's only video mode setting and a video driver involves a lot more (hardware accelerated graphics, GPGPU, video card memory management, etc); so this was only a half-baked solution.

To fix that, a little later some of those other things (e.g. video card memory management) got shifted into the kernel too; but not part of a unified "video driver", but separately so that different parts of the same driver are in different parts of the kernel. It's very idiotic, but that's just how Linux is. That only left hardware accelerated graphics and GPGPU in user space; which (as far as I know) is where those parts of the "video driver" remain today.

Note that I doubt any of this was done by Linus himself - all the poorly designed hackery to work around Linus' original stupidity was done by other people; to produce the "glorious" pitiful mess that Linux has for video card drivers now.

Also don't forget that Linux is "monolithic-ish" and there's nothing to prevent potentially malicious kernel modules/drivers from doing anything they like. Because of this, when companies (ATI, NVidia) tried to support Linux (with proprietary drivers) developers thanked them by spitting in these company's faces - "encouraging" open source by refusing to provide a standard driver interface and constantly breaking existing (proprietary) video drivers (and blaming ATI and NVidia for the pointless breakage Linux developers and Xorg caused) just to hide the fact that the kernel has no security (or, relies on "open source" for the illusion of security). This means that even today, despite thousands of people (including large companies) working on the problem over 20+ years, end users are still struggling to get video (especially 3D acceleration) to work right on Linux.


Cheers,

Brendan

Hello
I like to fit the native resolution of 1920x1200 for my 28" LCD monitor from HANNSG.

Manufacturer Colorfull
Geforce GTX295
1920x1200
VBE Modenumber / Color
017C 8 Bit Color
017D 32 Bit Color

Manufacturer Sapphire
Radeon 7950
1920x1200
VBE Modenumber / Color
01D1 8 Bit Color
01D2 16 Bit Color
01D4 32 Bit Color

Dirk

But, why don't you want to use BIOS?