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QEMU Making Progress With Legacy-Free Display Support - Avoids Old VGA Code

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  • QEMU Making Progress With Legacy-Free Display Support - Avoids Old VGA Code

    Phoronix: QEMU Making Progress With Legacy-Free Display Support - Avoids Old VGA Code

    As part of QEMU's emulated display support they have long had a lot of old VGA/SVGA support code around. But as that code is overly complex, has been prone to security issues, and less used these days with modern interfaces, the developers behind this important piece of the open-source virtualization stack have been working on eliminating the legacy display support...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Oh yeah? What will happen to my ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC VMs then? All of it supports VGA only.

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    • #3
      This can't be right. One of the aims of Qemu is to emulate old platforms like DOS. If they remove the Cirrus / VGA stuff then this will effectively eliminate its usefulness in this.

      Unless the new replacement code will emulate the old hardware still?

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      • #4
        Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
        This can't be right. One of the aims of Qemu is to emulate old platforms like DOS. If they remove the Cirrus / VGA stuff then this will effectively eliminate its usefulness in this.

        Unless the new replacement code will emulate the old hardware still?
        I haven't double-checked, but it says it's replacing it with Bochs Display code.

        Given that, the last time I used it, Bochs was even further down the "accuracy over speed" end of the spectrum than QEMU, and that it currently supports emulating either a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 ISA or a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446 PCI according to Wikipedia, I'm assuming that this is just a lateral move to improve maintainability.

        (Similar to how SeaBIOS began as a fork of the BIOS that the Bochs developers wrote.)

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        • #5
          Nobody is using old VGA code? I beg to differ, a lot of people do to run old MS-DOS software. This is really a terrible move, and is incredibly ignorant about who is using QEMU, the fact is a lot of people use QEMU to run old MS-DOS environments and games which require legacy VGA support, even CGA and EGA support. One of the big uses for an emulator is to support old MS-DOS games which made heavy use of these "obsolete" VGA modes. The idea that people are using QEMU only to run Windows 10 is really completely false and this change basically will render QEMU useless for the big things it is useful for which is legacy hardware support for very old hardware.

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          • #6
            Bochs supports VGA and even Cirrus. So yeah this isn't a big deal at all. It's not like they are removing VGA, they are just emulating it and it's bios with bochs. Unless I'm missing something, this removes no features at all, and is just removing old stuff with better code.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by ssokolow View Post
              ... a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 ISA ...
              I'm pretty sure CL-GD5430 is PCI or VLB only. They probably mean CL-GD5420 which was indeed used in ISA cards. This is totally irrelevant to the discussion, so I'll see myself out thanks.

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              • #8
                I also hope this does not mean they remove it entirely, as others use it for retro DOS games and such, and I also use it to develop some new nice GCC code to target vintage PCs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7vU5T6rKHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU3yZDISiD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjdyd3xcDVY
                Last edited by rene; 27 October 2018, 04:21 AM. Reason: typo

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                • #9
                  So I guess I'll be able to boot Manjaro with UEFI as a guest without having to disable it's GPU detection(which for whatever reason assumes BIOS/legacy initialization with int10)? Presently, you have to add a kernel parameter at boot to disable the systemd service before the live installer will boot. Then Xorg will properly detect correct driver to use/initialize and you'll get to actually install

                  The linked article also means no I/O ports are used and it'd be treated as a PCIe device? I think that might be good for VFIO, something about using Intel iGPU where it couldn't be the primary graphics adapter and required some workaround to use?(adding a spice output I think).

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
                    This can't be right. One of the aims of Qemu is to emulate old platforms like DOS. If they remove the Cirrus / VGA stuff then this will effectively eliminate its usefulness in this.

                    Unless the new replacement code will emulate the old hardware still?
                    In actuality, the biggest users of QEMU are cloud providers. Wipro, RedHat, Microsoft, HP, Amazon and tons of individual VPS companies.

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