How to access vbe video memory?

Question

I am wondering how to create a pointer to the vbe video memory so I can display graphics from my 32-bit os kernel. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

Download the VBE 3.0 standard (Wikipedia has all the links). Using it, write code to call function 2 to set a graphics mode, making sure you bitwise-OR the mode number with 4000h to tell the BIOS to use a flat linear frame buffer instead of windowed/segmented. Use function 1 to obtain the address of the video buffer (it should be in ModeInfoBlock.PhysBasePtr).

There should be plenty of reference code online for things like this.

I suggest to call VBE functions prior to going into protected mode as it will be harder to do afterwards.