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Bug#284909: ITP: vbetool -- run real-mode video BIOS code to alter hardware state



Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

* Package name    : vbetool
  Version         : 0.1
  Upstream Author : Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
* URL             : http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~mjg59/laptops/
* License         : GPL
  Description     : run real-mode video BIOS code to alter hardware state

vbetool uses lrmi in order to run code from the video BIOS. Currently, 
it is able to alter DPMS states, save/restore video card state and 
attempt to initialize the video card from scratch.

vbetool is primarily useful for attempting to recover from ACPI S3, 
since most hardware leaves the video card in an undefined state. 
Since it uses vm86, it will currently only work on x86 hardware - in the 
long run, I'd hope to move it over to Scitech's x86emu and give it more 
portability. It's also currently in the form of three separate tools, 
but I'll merge those in the near future.

Currently, the combination of:

switch away from X
vbetool savestate >foo
vbetool dpms off
(suspend)
vbetool post
vbetool restorestate <foo
vbetool dpms on
switch back to X

seems to work on a fairly wide range of hardware. Of course, this all 
interacts badly with framebuffers - there's an argument for getting the 
kernel to try to get userspace to do this before it attempts to resume 
framebuffer devices. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.9-1-386
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)



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