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Re: [Xen-devel] beginnings of allowing more than the basic 80x25 VGA scr

To: "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] beginnings of allowing more than the basic 80x25 VGA screen resolution
From: Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2005 17:02:10 +0100
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On 1 Jul 2005, at 16:48, Jan Beulich wrote:

With stack traces (during kernel crashes) being usually quite long, extending the capacity of the screen to at least 80x30 (20%) may already be considered helpful. I'm certain the patches won't be accepted as-is (namely the change to the start_info structure), but I need to get an understanding at what the expectations are to then try to adjust them.

I'll happily take a patch that increases range of text modes supported by Xen. But why bother to propagate this info to XenLinux? You can set a vga-mode parameter on XenLinux's command line. To make this easier, we could have Xen automatically add a suitable mode parameter to XenLinux command line, based on what was passed to Xen, if one wasn;t specified by the administrator.

The only downside of this is that, without hacks, XenLinux will probably reset the screen when it starts up (so you lose tail end of Xen output). I wonder if that is really much of a problem -- if XenLinux has booted far enough to actually reset vga, and then crashes, it's unlikely the tail end of Xen bootstrap output is actually very interesting. Certainly not interesting enough to implement and maintain big hacks to vga code.

 -- Keir


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