Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 22:53:51 +1100 From: Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy@optushome.com.au> To: Rodolphe Ortalo <ortalo@laas.fr> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: the mythical syscons redesign document ( was Re: Porting wscons ) Message-ID: <20030125115351.GA21347@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au> 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>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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'd prefer to retain state if at all possible. It's very useful being able to look back through the kernel output - whilst working on the TGA driver, I found it quite annoying that the main TGA device probe would wipe all the state. (This is also something I find particularly irritating about sysinstall - the probe messages are all wiped by the sysinstall menu so you don't know if the hardware was found correctly). Personally, I don't see why it's at all important to switch out of text mode quickly. Kernel output messages are inherently text so switching to a graphics mode just makes more work for the kernel. I know Sun have had their logo in the boot screen for as long as I can recall - and it's getting fancier with time - but I fail to see that this is more than unnecessary frippery. > Note that this does not necessarily mean discarding VGA-style display >mode; but for example if the board allows to access all needed VGA >registers via a MMIO area (instead of the usual fixed adresses regs around >0x3C0) and its framebuffer (including the VGA part) via another area, Whilst I can't verify it, I believe Tru64 does something like this. It's quite obvious that the text font on a VGA card changes when the card is probed during the main device tree scan. Presumably the card is being switched to a graphics mode by the main device driver. >difficult to share) VGA adresses in a multiple-boards configuration are >cleared, and further initialisations of remaining boards can proceed more >cleanly. How common is this? And how important is it that both cards function during boot? I have two Matrox Millennium-II cards in one of my systems and I'm not at all fazed by one of them not being initialised until X starts. I suspect that very few people have more than one graphics adapter and even fewer want to be able to use both adapters outside X. Peter To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20030125115351.GA21347>