From owner-freebsd-arch Thu Jan 23 13:30:41 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A0C4437B401 for ; Thu, 23 Jan 2003 13:30:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from cirb503493.alcatel.com.au (c18609.belrs1.nsw.optusnet.com.au [210.49.80.204]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ABA7843EB2 for ; Thu, 23 Jan 2003 13:30:39 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from peterjeremy@optushome.com.au) Received: from cirb503493.alcatel.com.au (localhost.alcatel.com.au [127.0.0.1]) by cirb503493.alcatel.com.au (8.12.5/8.12.5) with ESMTP id h0NLUYLZ017353; Fri, 24 Jan 2003 08:30:34 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from jeremyp@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au) Received: (from jeremyp@localhost) by cirb503493.alcatel.com.au (8.12.6/8.12.5/Submit) id h0NLUXl3017352; Fri, 24 Jan 2003 08:30:33 +1100 (EST) Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 08:30:33 +1100 From: Peter Jeremy To: Nicolas Souchu Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: the mythical syscons redesign document ( was Re: Porting wscons ) Message-ID: <20030123213033.GB17281@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au> References: <20030122010246.52789.qmail@web13404.mail.yahoo.com> <1043236066.28124.6.camel@builder02.qubesoft.com> <20030122223626.B8449@armor.fastether> <20030122220029.GD590@dhcp01.pn.xcllnt.net> <20030123075556.A10370@armor.fastether> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20030123075556.A10370@armor.fastether> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 07:55:56AM +0100, Nicolas Souchu wrote: >Not because of a minimal driver, but because syscons and even more pcvt >make assumptions on the features provided by the driver (font, text modes...) AFAIK, these assumptions are all part of the VGA standard - if you have a VGA-compatible graphics card then it will provide standard font and text modes as used by syscons and pcvt. And the only non-VGA graphics adapter I'm aware of is the DEC TGA (though it seems likely that some or all of the Sun framebuffers don't support VGA. I don't see any reason to not use the VGA features if they're available and unless there's a lot of non-VGA adapters around, they can be treated on a case-by-case basis. >As far as I could see this has be more or less resolved with the tga adapter >driver for alpha arch for which a renderer has been introduced to tackle down >framebuffer only video adapters. It's not clear how much of the TGA renderer could be reused by another FB-only adapter. Whilst the renderer is mostly rendering into a raw framebuffer, there are a fair number of implicit assumptions about how the bits in the framebuffer RAM turn into pixels on the screen. Note that this driver explicitly uses VGA mode if it detects a TGA2 adapter. Peter To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message