[OpenBIOS] Why some Linux distributions start booting to black screens

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 08/03/16 20:31, Programmingkid wrote:

> On Mar 8, 2016, at 2:42 PM, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> 
>> On 08/03/16 03:55, Programmingkid wrote:
>>
>>> Some Linux distributions like Fedora start booting to an all black screen. I found out the reason why is because there appears to be something wrong with the screen node's color! word. 
>>>
>>> If you type these commands in OpenBIOS:
>>> dev screen
>>> see color!
>>>
>>> You will see that color! is empty. This would definitely prevent the color of text from being changed. 
>>
>> color! definitely does work as I spent some time digging into it when I
>> rewrote the framebuffer code a while back. The issue seemed either
>> endian or depth related because the problem goes away in 8-bit mode,
>> e.g. try booting with -g 800x600x8 but I didn't really dig that far.
> 
> Why is it when I 'see' color! in OpenBIOS, the word is empty?

Well the "see" routines in OpenBIOS aren't 100% complete IIRC. Take a
look at driver/vga.fs and in particular color! which should call into
the VGA palette routines.


ATB,

Mark.