> No, that's not what I'm talking about at all.   What I'm talking about
> is having the X server tell the kernel what the frame buffer geometry
> is, so that the kernel doesn't *have* to whack any frame buffer
> registers.

I don't think that's very practical, but I'd love to hear that I'm
mistaken...  ;-)  If I understand you correctly, that would mean having
a bitmapped console driver (basically) in all kernels that would be
running X--ideally this would be the same console used for ports that
only have bitmapped displays.  Perhaps not a bad trade-off, anyway.
But on the PC (or anyone using ISA display cards and maybe even some
EISA/PCI adapters), this would also require some interface for
manipulating the video pages, would it not?  And that would depend on
more information than could be kept reasonably in the console driver...

On the PC video cards, is it possible to get back to text mode in
a standard fashion?  (At least for (S)VGA cards?)  If not, I don't
know if there is a good solution.  If so, X has to tell the console
that it's taking over, right?  So it should be possible--at least
for ddb--to get the display into text mode before it starts writing
to the console.

-allen

-- 
              Allen Briggs - end killing - briggs@macbsd.com