Xvesa black magic

[William Tracy]

Apparently xinit was eating a lot of potentially useful output.

Anybody able to extract anything meaningful from this session?

# Xvesa -mode 0x117 -kb -mouse mouse,/dev/input/mice
Int 10h (0x4F10) failed: 0x014F (function call failed)
No DPMS Support -1
FreeFontPath: FPE "build-ins" refcount is 2, should be 1; fixing.
# Xvesa -mode 0x117 -mouse mouse,/dev/input/mice
Mouse device is serial port, protocol exps/2 is not serial protocol
Int 10h (0x4F10) failed: 0x014F (function call failed)
No DPMS Support -1
FreeFontPath: FPE "built-ins" refcount is 2, should be 1; fixing.
# Xvesa -mode 0x117
Int 10h (0x4F10) failed: 0x014F (function call failed)
No DPMS Support -1
FreeFontPath FPE "built-ins" refcount is 2, should be 1; fixing.

For those who came in late, this is under Qemu. I had to retype the
output (Qemu doesn't seem to support copy-paste from a console
session, hehe) so I hope there's no typos in there. Once Xvesa is
launched, I can't make it respond to ctrl-alt-backspace signals from
Qemu; to get at the output above, I had to launch "sleep 30; pkill X"
in another terminal before each time I launched X.

I have other people's builds of Xvesa running happily under the same
emulator, so I can't see that the problem is with the emulator.

I don't know off the top of my head where I can look up kernel calls
(and Google isn't helping right now) so I don't know what 0x4F10 does.
(I'm going to guess that it involves video mode setting--if I leave
off the -mode flag, the server goes into a loop making failing 0x4F10
calls, which I assume is a symptom of a failed autodetect routine.)

Also, the "Mouse device is a serial port" message is interesting. I
can't seem to find any other magic combination of flags that triggers
that message; it makes me wonder if the mouse device I'm pointing
Xvesa at is not what I think it is.

If anyone can point me in the right direction to continue debugging
this, I would be very grateful.

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu
Vice President, Cal Poly Linux Users' Group
http://www.cplug.org

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your
right to say it."
    -- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, frequently mis-attributed to Voltaire