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Comment by mjg59 | Hacker News Reader

Xfree86 never did anything different to Xorg here. If you boot via CSM on a modern PC (which is really not something you should do, but, well) you should get Xorg running with the VBE backend using x86emu to execute the video BIOS, and if you boot via EFI you should get modesetting running on top of efifb using whatever mode your firmware and bootloader left you in.

But note that this is actually easier for 16 or 32 bit operating systems! Setting VESA modes involves making a real mode 16 bit call (there's nominally a 32 bit entry point for VESA but it was specced late in the standard's life and basically nobody implements a working version), and once you're running in 64-bit mode you've lost the ability to do vm86 so calling 16 bit code from userland becomes impossible. This is why x86emu is required (basically we read the video BIOS code and then run it under an x86 emulator), and it's not always perfect.

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I just wanna say that "we read the video BIOS code and then run it under an x86 emulator" sounds like some truly heroic effort by a bunch of engineers and I'm glad they did the work. I hope the people involved are proud of it.

IIRC, the reason it needed to be a VM in the first place was because X (simplifying a bit) "started" at Sun, running on PowerPC boxen. (Here's another subthread mentioning the same thing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42597613)

I agree it was an engineering marvel, IMO only less impressive than the CPU implemented in JPEG instructions for Pegasus.

X was originally an MIT development, and had no intrinsic ties to the underlying hardware (Sun implemented something called NeWS which ended up losing to X in the long run). Different vendors took the reference code and added device specific code to work, but this was an era where your hardware vendor was also your OS vendor so that was fairly transparent for most users. At this point almost every CPU architecture had their own expansion bus so there wasn't really any way you could plug a card intended for one machine into another. The vendor X server worked just fine.

And then PCI became ubiquitous and it was much cheaper to plug a PC card into a machine than buy an overpriced one from Sun or DEC or whatever, and people were starting to run Linux or *BSD instead of the vendor OS, and suddenly there was an incentive to be able to run graphics card x86 init code even on other CPU architectures.

I ended up stealing the concept and the code to make Ubuntu's usplash boot splash app work on 64-bit, which is an entirely different story.

> X (simplifying a bit) "started" at Sun, running on PowerPC boxen.

It didn’t. The X Windows system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System) started at MIT and is from 1984, PowerPC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC) from 1992.

Wrong on both accounts, neither Sun nor PowerPC were relevant to X Windows appearance into computing world.

Windows NT did this too. And it was the work of one engineer. (although that engineer was Dave Cutler…)

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