Messages in this thread | | | From | Egbert Eich <> | Date | Sun, 19 Dec 1999 10:48:08 +0100 (MET) | Subject | Re: vesafb on archs !ia32 [Re: Calling VESA BIOS routines from kernel?] |
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David Woodhouse writes: > > eich@hilbert.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de said: > > Why can't we turn on/switch the thin on run time? Have a simple > > utility execute the bios call from user space and then inform vesafb > > of the new paramters. But please: no IA32 emulator in the kernel! > > A fine plan. This would also allow us to use the vesafb code on other > architectures - all we need is a tool which can use the X4.0 loadable modules > to set up a linear framebuffer mode, then tell the kernel about it. > We (Xfree86) had a similar idea, too. It doesn't make much sense to build different drivers for the same chipset considering the limited number of really experienced driver people. Even if one project uses code from another project as example it is still a lot of work.
However there are a problem: Xfree86 4.0 has departed from the low level driver model 3.3 uses: Instead of passing a huge structure to the midlevel code to infor it of the properties of the lowlevel driver - which needs to get extended whenever new features get added to the server - the driver does a lot of initialization itself by calling the approprate functions. If for example the driver supports acceleration for 24bpp it will call the initialization functions for that when 24bpp is requested.
With this model we have a lot of Xserver specific setup calls in the driver which other systems don't require or require differnetly.
Regards, Egbert.
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