Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] Re: atyfb in 2.5.51

From: Antonino Daplas (adaplas@pol.net)
Date: Wed Dec 11 2002 - 07:49:35 EST


On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 04:11, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>
> I don't know if happened with earlier fbdev versions for you, but one
> possibility is that X reconfigures the display base, and possibly more
> bits of the card's internal memory map. Either fbdev should restore
> that, or adapt to what X set. On R128's and radeon's, this is things
> like DISPLAY_BASE_ADDR.
>
Although this is in the faqs for a long time, (behavior is undefined if
fbdev is used with software that touches the video card) this is an
issue that needs to be taken into consideration. Without the set_var()
hook, fbcon will depend on the contents of info->var if there is a need
to touch the hardware or not. And switching from X to the console will
not change the var, but since X actually did touch the hardware, you
just messed up your screen or worse, crashed the hardware.

Before, most drivers just unconditionally refresh the hardware at every
switch during set_var(). I've been pointing this out for a long time
now, do we unconditionally do a check_var()/set_par() after every
console switch, or do we rely on fbdev and X cooperating with each
other? Or better, maybe fbcon has a way of knowing if the switch came
from Xfree86.

Tony

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 15 2002 - 22:00:20 EST