Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 10:32:27 -0800 From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov> To: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, sos@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, yokota@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: GGI Message-ID: <199903081832.KAA00878@lestat.nas.nasa.gov>
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On Mon, 8 Mar 1999 00:26:02 -0400 (AST)
The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> wrote:
> A friend just picked himself up a Voodoo2 card that Linux now supports and
> keeps cramming down the "FreeBSD doesn't support 3D accelleration" line
> down my throat :( My card is *supposedly* faster then what he has, from
> comparing specs...be great if I can slam it back down his throat :)
Why should FreeBSD (or NetBSD for that matter) have to care about the
acceleration on the card? An operating system shoudl care about that
only for if the console is a linear framebuffer, and you want scrolling
to be Really Fast. (NetBSD's "wscons" console driver has hooks in the
terminal emulation layer for using hardware acceleration, which we
use on TURBOchannel "sfb" framebuffers, and soon on PCI TGA framebuffers.)
For _everything_ else, it all belongs in userland. At this point, the
OS's responsibility is to provide a reasonable set of device mapping
primitives which allow source code portability across architectures.
NetBSD's "wscons" has some (albiet not all, yet) of the hooks for this,
as well as some other basic things to make it possible to implement naive
graphics applications, such as get/set colormap, get/set hardware cursor
shape, get/set hardware cursor position, etc.
-- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
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