[okl4-developer] Console output on Iguana

[Jamie Lennox]

So Maybe i should give an overview of the problem more generally. 

I am writing a simple benchmark on iguana that will send an ipc back and
forth between server and client many times to do a benchmark (pinpong
test). I therefore dont want wombat in the way, i've got the code in the
examples folder as it was the easiest way to compile it on iguana. The
test works fine under qemu and have been running it with the qemu
-serial stdio command, but when i run it on the raw hardware (this
computer) as in the emulation i get no vga output and the data i want is
sent to serial.

I had started playing with writing a serial driver that just put things
onto vga as a combination of the l4kdb_uart driver and the linux kernel
drivers/video/vgacon.c files - it can be done but it is a painful
solution for something that must have been solved in the past.

I dont have anything to read from the serial port of the computer
(modern x86) and chances are if i did i'd have to write a driver for the
port.

I haven't heard of VGA options in the L4 kernel, the printing through L4
i know is the L4_KDB_PrintChar which is what the (default) l4kdb_uart
driver uses. (As does the drv_l4_kdb which doesn't compile and i assume
is out of date ?)

This is a basic benchmark featuring in all performance reports so i
think i must be overlooking something basic, if anyone can point out an
easier way of going about this it would be great. 

Thanks 

Jamie 

On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 12:38 +1100, Hal Ashburner wrote:
> Jamie Lennox wrote:
> > Should have mentioned that i am building with machine=ia32_pc99_vga.
> > I'm going to take a stab in the dark and assume there is no easily
> > available vga driver, right?
> 
> Hi Jamie,
> That builds you a vga driver in OK Linux - so you won't get L4 or Iguana
> output only linux output on it. It is also a little temperamental so if
> you need VGA in particular then you might want to play with the struct
> screen_info values set in arch/l4/kernel/setup.c to get some output.
> 
> Alternatively use ia32_pc99_fb for the framebuffer console, if there's a
> linux driver for your videocard that you can enable.
> 
> Playing with these things I like to run qemu with -serial stdio so I
> have serial output on my terminal as well as emulated vga or framebuffer
> output.
> 
> Another alternative depending on what you are trying to achieve is to
> enable the VGA driver in the L4 kernel then get everything to use that
> via the L4 KDB serial driver. That may take a bit of fiddling to get
> right and I haven't actually tried this myself.
> 
> All the best,
> Hal