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Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:34:52 -0700
From: Xin LI <delphij@delphij.net>
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To: "Carlos A. M. dos Santos" <unixmania@gmail.com>
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Cc: FreeBSD Current <current@freebsd.org>, olli@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Why VESA and DPMS are available only for i386?
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Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Several PRs were closed based on the argument that FreeBSD/amd64
> cannot call to the VESA BIOS. XFree86 solved this problem by means of
> the INT10 module. I believe that it would be possible to do the same
> on the FreeBSD kernel.
>
> Is there any ongoing effort to enable the VESA kernel moule on
> non-i386 platform? Is there any particular difficulty for doing this,
> besides depending on VM86?
>   
According to VESA's VBE 3.0 standard, there is a "Protected Mode Entry
Point" [optionally] provided by BIOS, which OS or application is
supposed to copy to a place where it is writable.  The code there would
be written in 16-bit protected mode.  Therefore I think it's do-able...

http://www.vesa.org/public/VBE/vbe3.pdf

Cheers,