On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 10:04:01PM -0800, Aaron J. Grier wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 04:31:24PM -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 03:58:18PM -0500, Michael Lorenz wrote:
> > > There was a proposal for a VESA BIOS extension to talk to a blitter
> > > but as far as I remember it never got anywhere.
> > 
> > Can't it use VGA text mode for text, at least?
> 
> vesafb would cease to be a framebuffer, then, and isn't that the whole
> point of vesafb?
> 
> > The problem is, with wscons attached to vesafb, the console is
> > unusuably slow; with wscons attached to vga, and a direct-hardware-
> > access X server, X11 is unsafe.
> 
> so pick your poison.

That's an incredibly bogus non-answer.  We already have wscons drivers
that provide accellerated text rendering using hardware text modes while
also providing usable-by-X frame buffers.

What exactly is the excuse why vesafb must (according to you, and
evidently Michael too) not work that way?  The fact that it can't is
responsible for a major longstanding security hole in the i386 port.

Thor