Jan Dolezal bachelor thesis available - RTEMS VESA BIOS graphics on Current PC Graphics Cards

[Pavel Pisa]

Hello everybody,

I would like to inform that full text of the bachelor
thesis

Drivers and Libraries Enabling RTEMS OS GUI on Current PC Graphics Cards

has been defended and is available online

https://dspace.cvut.cz/handle/10467/61467

https://dspace.cvut.cz/bitstream/handle/10467/61467/F3-BP-2015-Dolezal-Jan-Drivers-and-Libraries-Enabling-RTEMS-OS-GUI-on-Current-PC-Graphics-Cards.pdf

It provides some generic overview and the documents
actual implementation.

The VESA BIOS based support is chosen to be a default graphic option
for x86 based systems for upcoming RTEMS 4.11 release. Long story short

pc386 family (pc386 .. pc686) VESA BIOS Extension (VBE) based frame buffer configuration selected by default

    the switch to graphic mode is controlled by multiboot option --video=auto|off|1024x768-32 etc.
    application can override default none by exporting variable const char * const rtems_fb_default_mode="auto"; 

Possible followup tasks:

  - provide RTEMS text console/kernel messages output to framebuffer
    in graphic mode - can be based on Qiao Yang character output for RPi console
      https://github.com/yangqiao/rtems/blob/framebuffer/c/src/lib/libbsp/arm/raspberrypi/console/outch.c
  - use some x86 instructions emulator/executor to allow use PCI/PCIe
    VBE equipped graphic cards on non-x86 systems

It would worth to add link to thesis to the list of RTEMS references,
but there is a problem/question where. The complete list of all
references maintained on original Wiki is now moved to the section TBR

  https://devel.rtems.org/wiki/TBR/Website/RTEMSReferences

Best wishes,

             Pavel