Re: GGI Project Unhappy On Linux

Erik Andersen (andersee@debian.org)
Fri, 27 Mar 1998 23:15:54 -0700

On Fri, Mar 27, 1998 at 05:50:42PM +0100, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > How does fbcon work with hardware acceleration? [Once we solve
> > acceleration issue somehow, we can get rid of GGI and use fbcon
> > instead. But - I'm not sure if such thing even can be done. With
> > cards having critical registers neer non-critical ones :-( ]
>
> >From user space, the X server mmaps the MMIO registers.
>
> For text console acceleration (mainly scrolling), the kernel knows how to do
> simple blits for some chipsets. If no blit routines are available, it will use
> the CPU.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Geert

Hmm. Could fbcon be made to work _with_ libggi? That way the
framebuffer's drawing and acceleration code could stay in the userspace
libggi library -- not in the kernel. This move to a userspace libggi
could also move the "blits for some chipsets" code already in the kernel
out to userspace as well, so the kernel gets to use the nice, safe, sane
svga card support from the ggi folks, the ggi folks stay happy because
the Linux world finally apprecieates them, the X server folks get to
focus on X windowing things (instead of graphics card support) because
ALL Linux targets are just framebuffers, and Linus stays happy because
the device abstraction stays the same as it is now.

Just a thought.

-Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen   Web:    http://www.inconnect.com/~andersen/ 
                   email:  andersee@debian.org
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