From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Dec 27 20:00:33 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id UAA10868 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 27 Dec 1995 20:00:33 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [192.216.222.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id UAA10858 for ; Wed, 27 Dec 1995 20:00:25 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id TAA00279; Wed, 27 Dec 1995 19:59:59 -0800 To: Michael Smith cc: jdli@linux.csie.nctu.edu.tw (Chien-Ta Lee), freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: syscons driver In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 28 Dec 1995 14:17:34 +1030." <199512280347.OAA00835@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Date: Wed, 27 Dec 1995 19:59:58 -0800 Message-ID: <277.820123198@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > SVGAlib is a wank. Sorry to all those Linuxers who just love it, but > it doesn't actually _achieve_ anything. Well, I think that's actually a bit harsh.. I've seen a couple of perfectly acceptable games running under svgalib (asteroids, doom) and apparently there's even a slick little gui toolkit somewhere for it. >From the achievement standpoint, it's not been that bad. The major criticism of it seems rather to be that it's insufficiently general - you need a low level shim written for each type of gfx card chipset. Given the speed at which new video cards are appearing on the market, I can easily see serious disadvanges to this and would much prefer an API that let me talk to *any* "Generic VGA" card at 640x480 resolution. I'm not sure if that's possible with syscons, but it'd certainly be the goal to shoot for. Anything else is just signing up for a long-term pain in the butt. Jordan