SeaVGABIOS is a sub-project of the SeaBIOS project - it is an open source implementation of a 16bit X86 VGA BIOS. SeaVGABIOS is the default VGA BIOS on QEMU. SeaVGABIOS can also run natively on some X86 VGA hardware with coreboot.
To build SeaVGABIOS, obtain the code, run make menuconfig and select the type of VGA BIOS to build in the “VGA ROM” menu. Once selected, run make and the final VGA BIOS binary will be located in “out/vgabios.bin”.
The choice of available VGA BIOSes within “make menuconfig” is dependent on whether CONFIG_QEMU, CONFIG_COREBOOT, or CONFIG_CSM is selected. Also, the debug options under the “Debugging” menu apply to SeaVGABIOS. All other options found in “make menuconfig” apply only to SeaBIOS and will not impact the SeaVGABIOS build.
If SeaVGABIOS is needed for multiple different devices (eg, QEMU‘s cirrus emulation and QEMU’s “dispi” emulation), then one must compile SeaVGABIOS multiple times with the appropriate config for each build.
The source code for SeaVGABIOS is located in the SeaBIOS git repository. The main VGA BIOS code is located in the “vgasrc/” directory. The VGA BIOS code is always compiled in 16bit mode.
The SeaVGABIOS builds to a separate binary from the main SeaBIOS binary, and much of the VGA BIOS code is separate from the main BIOS code. However, much of the SeaBIOS developer documentation applies to SeaVGABIOS. To contribute, please join the SeaBIOS mailing list.