From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Mar 8 10:33:38 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from lestat.nas.nasa.gov (lestat.nas.nasa.gov [129.99.50.29]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D6BA214BDC; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:33:35 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from thorpej@lestat.nas.nasa.gov) Received: from lestat (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by lestat.nas.nasa.gov (8.8.8/8.6.12) with ESMTP id KAA00878; Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:32:28 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <199903081832.KAA00878@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> To: The Hermit Hacker Cc: Mike Smith , "Daniel C. Sobral" , Terry Lambert , sos@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, yokota@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: GGI Reply-To: Jason Thorpe From: Jason Thorpe Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 10:32:27 -0800 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 8 Mar 1999 00:26:02 -0400 (AST) The Hermit Hacker 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message