Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 12:49:09 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: grog@lemis.com, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: reset screen hardware? Message-ID: <199708171949.MAA07244@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199708171009.TAA04212@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Aug 17, 97 07:39:40 pm
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> That's _right_. But it achieves this by knowing, in fact having > _been_told_ in advance what the hardware is, and thus having > hardware-specific intelligence. The point is that this intelligence > is foreign to the kernel, unmaintainable in the kernel environment, > and _inevitably_ will lag, often indefinitely, behind hardware > development. 1) Make X use the kernel driver. Period. This is necessary whether the driver is card-specific, generic BIOS-based, or generic VGA (and BIOS) based. 2) Default to a generic VGA driver. This is your fallback position for "anything which works is better than anything which doesn't". 3) If there is a card specific driver and you have the card, load the LKM for it at boot time after the FS's are mounted and the driver code can be located. Use the LKM driver in place of the generic driver from then on. 4) If you are running an ELF/OLF kernel, and the VM system supports section attribution and section naming, discard the "generic VGA" section after loading the LKM. 5) If you are running an ELF/OLF kernel, and you have a section archiver available, you may (at your option), take the generic kernel, dearchive the section(s) containing the generic VGA driver, and replace them with the section(s) for the card specific driver. 6) If you are running an ELF/OLF kernel, and you have a section archiver available, you may "tune" the kernel down to the point where it contains *only* drivers for existing hardware and reasonably expected expansion hardware. 7) ...ROM that kernel! (And other nifty things...). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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