Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC] support console resolutions better than 80x25

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2 Aug 2006, at 12:22, Jan Beulich wrote:

> While a poor man's version of this had been posted a long time ago, 
> I'd like to re-raise
> the issue: On machines either not having a serial port or being too 
> far away from a
> second machine, debugging must solely rely on the VGA console. On 25 
> lines one can't,
> however, display a lot of things - frequently, a simple register and 
> stack dump doesn't
> even fit. Therefore I have been running with code supporting up to 
> 80x60 for more
> than the last half year, and prior to that I had been using 
> aforementioned poor man's
> version supporting 80x30.
> Clearly, the most important thing here besides initializing the actual 
> mode is to establish
> a channel by which the hypervisor can communicate the screen geometry 
> to the guest.
> Other than in the originally posted version, this is now done without 
> modifying the
> startup info structure layout; instead, the two (meaningless for dom0) 
> console_* fields
> are now being (mis-)used for communication size and location of a new 
> console_info
> structure. That structure contains all the video related information 
> Linux would normally
> obtain from the BIOS, including the potential of using a VESA 
> (graphics) based console
> (which would be the next logical step I'm planning to take at some 
> point).
> If there is a reasonable chance for such code to get merged, I'll put 
> together a patch
> and post it here for review.
Being limited to 80x25 is a pita. I'd be interested in seeing a patch 
(just a rough one for initial comments if you can do that with less 
effort).
 -- Keir


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