Re: Paging Beth Stone

Annie wrote: 
On 2005-09-14 spamandviruses@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx said:

   > Annie wrote:
   >
   > > Seems like you SHOULD be able to switch the processor into
   > > Virtual-86 mode, do your video-mode manipulations, and then
   > > switch back to protected mode.
   >
   > Yes, it's possible, but Linux is one undocumented little ***.

"man 2 vm86" sure isn't very enlightening. We *do* have the source code available to us - joy that it is to decypher. :(

   > I was going to do that, since that would give me any mode I wanted
   > under any possible circumstance, but I couldn't find the details of
   > the vm86 system call anywhere.  In fact, if I found the necessary
   > details, I'd give up this Windows *** right this second.

I'm probably too new to figure it out, but I'll look into it... *Anything* to keep a programmer from the Windows ***! :)

   > Doing
   > the VESA via VM86 thing would be a bit of a bitch,


I refer you to the comment in the asmutils "cp.asm":

; Recursive copying is a bitch, but what the hell!
; We do ASM here.

I suspect vm86 is a bigger bitch than recursive copying. Perhaps an "intractible" problem...

   > but the reason I
   > gave up on Linux was because what I wanted wasn't possible, not
   > because it was difficult.

.... but maybe not impossible... It's probably not possible to support "all" hardware. (Linux has problems with hardware support. What else is new?) But what you've *got* is pretty impressive. Have you looked at "Softer", Beth? Richard/Philip... (should we just call you "pj"?) has done things I would have said "use svgalib or forget it"! Perhaps it's a comment on the state of Linux "graphics" programming that VGA modes from asm are a big whoop, but there it is. Library-free graphics are "Nice work! Thanks!"

http://xerse.nfshost.com/softer/

The "test" code with it is in Perl. I'm working (in my usual not-too-ambitious manner) on some asm examples. (my attempts to use "select" are returning -14 - -EFAULT - ... not one of the possible errors "man 2" lists, so I deduce I've bleeped it up royally) I *do* have - working but needs to be cleaned up - a "merger" of Annie's font (that's "freeware", right?) and Richard/Philip/pj's work to get text on a 640x480x16 screen. (same technique would work on 320x240, but it would be "big" text)

_____ You may have come to the right ((( `\
place. The LuxASM development _ _`\ )
team (LuxASM is a forthcoming (^ ) )
specific assembler for Linux) ~-( )
hangs out in this newsgroup. _'((,,,)))

Yeah... C(the developer) knows some Linux asm (but is short on time to work on it). I'm the "cheif maintainer", but I'm a newbie to Linux asm. I don't know how much Beth actually knows about Linux asm...

                                          ,-' \_/    `\
       Beth Stone, one of the team       (          ,  |
       members, made it her project       `-.-'`-.-'/|_|
       to document all of the Linux          \     / | |
       system calls.                          =()=: / ,' aa

       HEY BETH! Help this guy out,
       won't you?

More likely, the LuxAsm team would dearly love to recruit Richard to help *us* out! Beth might be able to explain Windows programming to someone who isn't a newbie to asm but knows Linux quite well (if we can persuade her to keep it concise), but I don't *think* she's going to be able to help Richard with Linux much. (I would dearly love to be wrong on that!!!)

Best,
Frank
.