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From: Antony T Curtis <antony.t.curtis@ntlworld.com>
To: Dag-Erling =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
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Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 23:37:42 +0100
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Cc: Xin LI <delphij@delphij.net>, Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com>,
	freebsd-current@freebsd.org, delphij@freebsd.org,
	Eric Kjeldergaard <kjelderg@gmail.com>, Jeremie Le Hen <jeremie@le-hen.org>
Subject: Re: [CALL FOR TESTERS] VESA High Resolution Console support from
	DragonFly
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On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 22:28 +0200, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com> writes:
> > I noticed that changing to 16bit (instead of 32 or 24) helped a lot.
> 
> ...because more pixels fit in a single 64 kB page, so the console code
> doesn't have to switch pages as much while redrawing the screen.
> Switching pages requires switching to virtual x86 mode (stalling the
> CPU and invalidating the cache) to invoke the VESA BIOS.  On graphic
> adapters with linear framebuffer support (pretty much all of them
> today), you can map the entire framebuffer into memory to avoid
> paging, but our VESA driver doesn't know how to do that.

Strange, I thought that the VESA driver did know how to do that. I
recall years ago writing a driver for XFree86 3.3 which used the FreeBSD
VESA driver to switch video mode and set up a linear frame buffer.

I have even found the ancient email with it...
http://listserver.uk.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-users/2001-May/003629.html

-- 
Antony T Curtis, BSc.                   UNIX, Linux, *BSD, Networking
antony.t.curtis@ntlworld.com            C++, J2EE, Perl, MySQL, Apache
                                        IT Consultancy.