On 948757776 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
Miles Nordin wrote:
>
>I've been wondering about this for a long time but i'm pretty ignorant as
>to the low-level issues involved w.r.t. NetBSD and compatibility with odd
>cards. I've never actually seen anything but a serial console on
>NetBSD/i386 because I have only fixed-frequency monitors.  So this is
>almost guaranteed to be a dumb question, but it would be considerable
>effort for me to self-educate--appologies in advance.

I've been thinking about doing something about this for a while,
as I have a couple of old SGI/Sun fixed sync monitors that I use
on my Multias, since their console just works on them.  It actually
wouldn't be _that_ hard to get the right thing to happen as there
is blitting code lying around in the kernel just asking to be used
for this purpose.  Unfortunately it has some disadvantages -- it
would be dog slow, and the kernel would have to have intimate
knowledge of the graphics cards in question and their RAMDACs.
Also, in order for the it to produce a workable console it would
have to have information about your sync rates at a time when it
might be a bit inconvenient to open a file and read it.  And this
approach doesn't answer at all the question of the boot blocks,
which would not produce visible output.

 == Roland Dowdeswell                      http://www.Imrryr.ORG/~elric/  ==
 == The Unofficial NetBSD Web Pages        http://www.Imrryr.ORG/NetBSD/  ==
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