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

["Jan Beulich" <jbeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

Jan

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