[ipxe-devel] vesafb questions/suggestions

[Michael Brown]

On 07/01/14 22:22, Oliver Rath wrote:
> 1st, Im using with passion the console.command. Now I noticed, that
> ipxe-screensize shows some display resolutions with "(unsupported)" (if
> i compiled ipxe with DEBUG=vesafb). What does this mean? Is the solution
> already available  but not supported yet form ipxe? Im playing around
> with some computers having > 1600x1200 pixel as vbe modes.

The "unsupported" flag is returned by the VESA BIOS, indicating the the 
mode definition exists but cannot be used in the current hardware 
configuration.  This could be, for example, because the attached display 
cannot support that resolution, or because the mode doesn't support a 
linear framebuffer.

> 2nd, I saw that the biggest font supported by ipxe seems to be 9x16_ALT
> (which doesnt work on my screen, but 8x16 does). Are there some bigger
> fonts in VBE mode available?

Do you mean that the 9x16 font doesn't exist in your BIOS?  Is iPXE 
therefore unable to display text on your system?  If so, that's a 
problem we need to fix.

> 3rd, as a suggestion, i use some background pics with a kind of frame,
> so it would be nice limiting the area where i.e. menu-entries are
> displayed. This is indeed possible while playing around with the
> parameters of menu, but not in a general way.

Yes, this is planned.  Probably using "--top", "--bottom", "--left" and 
"--right" options to the "console" command to specify margins for the 
text area.  (This in turn will mean renaming "--bpp" to "--depth"; I'm 
allowed to do this since the documentation hasn't been written yet!)

Michael