Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 07:55:56 +0100 From: Nicolas Souchu <nsouch@free.fr> To: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@xcllnt.net> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG, Rodolphe Ortalo <ortalo@laas.fr> Subject: Re: the mythical syscons redesign document ( was Re: Porting wscons ) Message-ID: <20030123075556.A10370@armor.fastether> In-Reply-To: <20030122220029.GD590@dhcp01.pn.xcllnt.net>; from marcel@xcllnt.net on Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 02:00:29PM -0800 References: <20030122010246.52789.qmail@web13404.mail.yahoo.com> <1043236066.28124.6.camel@builder02.qubesoft.com> <20030122223626.B8449@armor.fastether> <20030122220029.GD590@dhcp01.pn.xcllnt.net>
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On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 02:00:29PM -0800, Marcel Moolenaar wrote: > On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 10:36:26PM +0100, Nicolas Souchu wrote: > > > > > > The main sticking point for this stuff is that console is needed before > > > the device tree is probed. > > > > The approach of KGI is to provide a very basic/minimal driver for console boot > > that can be overlaped later by fully probed graphic board drivers. This is > > somehow how VGA adapter is organized, with the video_switch used immediatly > > and later the vga_isa.c glue-code for newbus full attachement. > > This is what makes it non-portable and why we have problems getting > it to work in non-PC, non-ISA environments. Not because of a minimal driver, but because syscons and even more pcvt make assumptions on the features provided by the driver (font, text modes...) As far as I could see this has be more or less resolved with the tga adapter driver for alpha arch for which a renderer has been introduced to tackle down framebuffer only video adapters. > > But I prefer the solution of the minimal driver with included text rendering > > if needed. > > Booting a notebook in text mode looks ugly and I can imagine that > early boot environments can be graphical as well. I prefer not to > fixate on text-only video modes for the low-level console, even > though we probably won't use it for anything but text. I agree. But booting a true PCI/AGP (and not ISA) graphic card without the bus stuff initialized seems very hard. KGI driver framework provides its own bus interface that can be either connected to the OS busses or directly drive the I/O registers. I have to consider it closely... -- Nicholas Souchu - nsouch@free.fr - nsouch@FreeBSD.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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