We're looking at various techniques for doing console-level graphics under
Linux. So far, there seem to be few solutions: X, GGI, SVGAlib, or fbcon.
X is unspeakable for what we want. GGI and SVGAlib are both pretty icky, which
leaves fbcon.
Unfortunately, one of the things we're looking for is hardware acceleration.
I've looked at the fbcon drivers; a lot of them do support acceleration, in
particular blits, but only internally (i.e. used by the text consoles). There
doesn't appear to be any exported API.
Now, we're probably going to have to write our own driver for this particular
chip anyway, so it wouldn't be too hard for us to add ioctls to interface to
the acceleration systems. But rather than just pick them out of thin air, it'd
be nice to do something that would be in line with the rest of the system...
particularly that since the fbcon stuff isn't modularised, we wouldn't be able
to use a binary-only driver, so people will actually be *reading* our code.
So, finally, my questions: *is* there an acceleration API for fbcon? If yes,
where, and if not, who do I talk to about it? Is there any documentation on
the fbcon API (and no, I don't mean the source files)? How would I go about
writing a driver for some weird and wonderful new graphics card?
I can't help noticing that the fbcon drivers haven't changed much recently. I
hope they're still considered the Right Way to go...
-- David Given dg@tao-group.com- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:21 EST