From owner-freebsd-current Tue Jun 4 17:52:30 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id RAA26186 for current-outgoing; Tue, 4 Jun 1996 17:52:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id RAA26181 for ; Tue, 4 Jun 1996 17:52:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id RAA27881; Tue, 4 Jun 1996 17:47:52 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199606050047.RAA27881@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Vm fixes NG To: james@miller.cs.uwm.edu (Jim Lowe) Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 17:47:51 -0700 (MST) Cc: terry@lambert.org, FreeBSD-current@FreeBSD.org, fcurrent@jraynard.demon.co.uk, grog@lemis.de In-Reply-To: <199606041921.OAA16941@miller.cs.uwm.edu> from "Jim Lowe" at Jun 4, 96 02:21:22 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > > Syscons seems to be able to do this just fine via . It > > > would sure be nice to be able to drop into the debugger when running X > > > w/o having to switch to another virtual console first. > > > > The only fix would be for *all* graphic modes to be settable *only* > > through the console driver, so that the console driver can unset > > them without having to ask a user space program to do it for it. > > I didn't realize that the X server was the one actually doing this. > I don't think it is necessary for *all* graphics modes to be settable > *only* through the console driver. Dropping the X server into the > kernel seems like a big waste of space -- but I guess it is an option :-). Which is why you would only drop the DDX into the kernel, not the whole server, and dynamically load per-card DDX implementations other than generig VGA on an as-needed basis. > It should be possible to download two code segments to syscons when X > starts up for each particular card (or X-server). This code sequence would > be ``put me into default mode'' and ``put me into graphics mode''. Sorry, but there are gate-enable/gate-disable sequences that must be executed in order, especially for the Mach 32/64 cards. It won't work without putting more code for an interpreter than it would take to put the generic VGA DDX code down there. > Of course, the X server would have to update the ``put me into graphics mode'' > when you used <+,->, but that wouldn't be a big deal. In any case, > it is certainly do able without teaching syscons everything that X > knows. All syscons really needs to know is how to switch modes back and > forth. And all the DDX code needs to do is provide a fame-buffer style interface with certain drawing primitives abstracted for use by X, MGR, DOS emulation, Mac emulation, VGA lib, etc., etc.. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.