Re: matroxfb, penguins and cursor (was some kernel-digest)

Petr Vandrovec Ing. VTEI (VANDROVE@vc.cvut.cz)
Mon, 16 Nov 1998 19:28:42 MET-1


Hello Peter, hello hackers, hello everyone,
.... H. Peter A. on Mon, Nov 16, complained about flashing cursor, penguins ....
new version of matroxfb is in queue at vger or at Linus... It allows
you to choose from VGAcon cursor shapes - you can get old blinking
underline (nonblinking not supported).
Meanwhile, you can echo "^[[?17;85;0c" to get "softcursor" - attribute
of character with cursor is ored with 0 and xored with 85 - it is
magnetha-green cursor on standard black-white text. You can experiment with
both values... First byte (17) means 0x01 -> disable hardware cursor,
0x10 -> enable software cursor. To get back to default, echo "^[[?0;0;0c".
There are defined other bits (0x20, 0x40), but I do not fully understand,
what they means. Low four bits specify hardware cursor type - default
fbcon supports only flashing block, vga (and new matroxfb) supports
flashing underline, low third inverted, bottom half, bottom two thirds and
full block inverted. I'll do non-flashing hardware cursor, if there is
interest (and there is as I see). Unfortunately, every pixel can be either
passed through, inverted or set to color 0 or color 1. But if you choose
to use color 0 or color 1, you can end up with invisible cursor (if
background or foreground is color 0 or color 1). Unfortunately, there is
(alpha stage) API to set hardware cursor shape, but because of I did not
found tool to use that API, I did not implement it... But if there is
interest in creating obscure cursor shapes (hourglass, arrow...)...
To penguin: There was patch flying around two or three weeks ago (in
linux-kernel) which moved penguins from top to right edge of screen,
decreasing screen width. After some changes in scrolling code it worked with
scrollback (by patch author). Unfortunately, patch was mixed together with
"scroll screen up in n-lines chunks instead of 1 line at time", but that
part did not work, so I did not even try rest. I think that Geert too.
You can also boot with "video=matrox:depth:4" if you have Millenium (I or
II) and you compiled 4bpp support into kernel. In this case no logo is
displayed (kernel does not know, how display logo in 4bpp cfb) and full
scrollback is available. Maybe there is parameter "nologo", but I do not
think so.
Best regards,
Petr Vandrovec
vandrove@vc.cvut.cz

P.S.: softcursor is there for months (years), contributed by Pavel Machek.
Unfortunately, softcursor does not flash (unfortunately for me, I have
big problems to find nonblinking cursor).

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