*BSD News Article 11382


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From: dsantry@maccs.mcmaster.ca (Doug Santry)
Subject: programming the VGA with 386BSD
Message-ID: <1993Feb19.231451.6605@mcshub.dcss.mcmaster.ca>
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Organization: Department of Computer Science, McMaster University
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1993 23:14:51 GMT
Lines: 11

I was wondering if anyone knows how to program the VGA under bsd.  I
want to change the videomode to one of my SVGA modes and then turn
on pixels, when done return to the standard text mode.  I assume that the
kernel wouldn't let me write bytes to my VRAM because my session doesn't
own the memory.  I also don't know how to change the videomode since I would
have to write to the video card's registers.  Is there anyway to get the
card's BIOS routines to work under bsd?  I have never done any UNIX low-level
programming before so some advice or a solution would be greatly appreciated.

Doug Santry
Dept. of Computer Science McMaster U.