Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 18:12:57 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: proff@suburbia.net (Julian Assange) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SVGATextMode under FBSD Message-ID: <199609210842.SAA18103@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199609210731.RAA15662@suburbia.net> from "Julian Assange" at Sep 21, 96 05:31:35 pm
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Julian Assange stands accused of saying: > > I have a fetish for large text screens (the one I'm writing this email on > is 180x60 (8x16 font) 10800 chars on screen at once, that's 5 x as much > information before my brain). FreeBSD's inability to do this is the > biggest problem I have with it, so I've started porting linux's SVGATextMode > package. You would be better off writing an LHM wrapper that could load drivers for known video cards and perform a set of basic operations on them, and then provide hooks for the console drivers (both syscons and pcvt) to use them. > Linux also has: > > int ioperm(unsigned long from, unsigned long num, int turn_on); This is not (yet) possible with FreeBSD, as all processes share a common I/O permissions map, and I/O permissions are granted on an all-or-nothing basis. You will need to enlist the help of an Intel guru and at least one kernel hacker to change this. I believe that Sean (sef@freebsd.org) has this on his list; certainly it will become an issue for the vm86 subsystem soon. Bruce has also revealed knowledge of the issue previously. > Which are really just backends to KDADDIO|KDDISABIO and KDENABIO|KDDELIO > respectively. Use of the console driver for controlling I/O permissions is incredibly bogus, and almost certainly stems historically from lazy programming. > Linux impliments KDADDIO/ioperm as a 128 byte bitmap for each process. > This is the way I'd like to see it in FreeBSD, but I do not understand > the how inb/outb interacts with the mm system well enough to do this > confidently (comments on this?). In/out do not interact with the system at all. If you execute an in/out instruction and you don't have the IOPL bit set, you'll trap and be killed. If you do, then the instructions execute as normal. Your suggestions wrt. maintaining linux compatability are worth pursuing IMO. > |Julian Assange RSO | PO Box 2031 BARKER | Secret Analytic Guy Union | Your .sig is too wide. -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] Collector of old Unix hardware. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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