Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 15:15:33 -0800 From: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@xcllnt.net> To: Rodolphe Ortalo <ortalo@laas.fr> Cc: Nicolas Souchu <nsouch@free.fr>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: the mythical syscons redesign document ( was Re: Porting wscons ) Message-ID: <20030124231533.GA47190@dhcp01.pn.xcllnt.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0301242229490.489-100000@tempest.rod.fr> References: <20030123234431.GB555@athlon.pn.xcllnt.net> <Pine.LNX.4.21.0301242229490.489-100000@tempest.rod.fr>
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On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 10:58:12PM +0100, Rodolphe Ortalo wrote: > > I understand clearly why doing so may be important for serial consoles (or > possibly other non-display adapters), but wrt most (modern) VGA adapters, > I have the feeling that discarding the state and switching to some > advanced mode should be done as soon as possible! :-) I cannot disagree. Preserving state may range from being crucial important to totally bollocks. If we switch to some hi-res graphics mode as part of the low-level console probing and selection, I don't immediately feel any pain by loosing the info that the loader has put on the screen. Doing it as part of bus-enumeration and loosing the output for half the device probes hurts... State also doesn't have to be visible. State could also mean some data passed to us through the loader by the firmware. In any case YMMV. For the hackery on the ia64 branch I reuse the softc that I initialize during low-level console probing when I find the device during bus-enumeration so that I can defer setting cn_dev to when I actually know the unit number instead of kludging around the phase ordering problem... > What I have to experiment yet is to replace the primary head VGA-only > boot driver with another instance of the Matrox driver (and get rid > entirely of the boot drivers), and do this first in the rc scripts. Yuck :-) I don't see a problem really. Maybe because I don't understand what you're trying to achieve, but I don't see how handling of graphics controllers is different from sound controllers. If there's no specific driver, but the hardware is VGA compatible, you use a generic VGA driver. In any case, you either compile-in the right drivers or you depend on module loading to achieve some dynamic behaviour. I categorize the replacement of active drivers during runtime without tearing down the "clients" of the driver first as... as... well, I don't even have a bucket for it. Trash comes closest :-) -- Marcel Moolenaar USPA: A-39004 marcel@xcllnt.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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