[syslinux] isolinux 2.0 boot graphic display issue

[Daniel Robbins]

On Tue, 2002-12-24 at 18:12, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> It's almost certainly a bug in the VGA BIOS on this card (not 
> initializing some of the color registers, or not allowing them to be 
> changed.)
> 
> I have very little time to chase down a cosmetic problem with one 
> particular video card.

It has been observed on at least two completely different types of
cards:

ATI Radeon 7500 (manufactured by ATI)
NVIDIA Geforce4 Ti 4400 (unknown manufacturer)

With the graphic displayed (when isolinux does the right thing,) the
text appears at the bottom of the screen. When this bug happens, the
text is at the top of the screen.

If it were simply some kind of bug regarding setting color registers,
then the colors would be wrong but the graphic would still be visible,
or at least the text would appear in the same place. Right now it looks
like it is somehow skipping the graphic display process entirely.

VGA is a pretty basic thing -- both these cards should be able to
display 640x480x16 colors bug-free with no problem. These are modern
cards. Other programs can obviously use the 6480x480x16 color mode with
no problem. It is likely an issue with the isolinux program itself.

If you point me to the code that initializes the graphics mode, I can
forward this issue to a friend of mine who is an expert in VGA and VESA
programming and see what he can do. That way, you won't have to waste
your time looking into this cosmetic bug. Just give me a few pointers of
what to look at.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins
Chief Architect, Gentoo Linux
http://www.gentoo.org
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