Re: Framebuffer / splashscreen support

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009, matthew sporleder wrote:
> On 8/24/09, Elric <elric%anche.no@localhost> wrote:
> > Hi guys!
> >  Have you ever seen those nice Linux splashscreen ?
> >  I would like to have something similar on my netbsd boxes but i don't
> >  really know how to do it.
> >
> >  There is an *official* or at least recent way to get a splash screen
> >  during the boot time, and a way to have a framebuffer (something like
> >  the vga=792 linux boot option) under netbsd ?
>
> There used to be vesafb and splash under NetBSD 4, but I think they
> were replaced by genfb and ???.  Sorry, I've used genfb with much
> success to get a more vga-style console but I'm not sure how to do the
> splash screen in 5+.

vesafb and splashscreen are in NetBSD 5 too. genfb and ??? are for 
-current. As for ???, jmcneill has bootloader patches that load a bmp file 
on -current, but as you'll appreciate this is loaded much earlier on and 
requires changes to bootloader, boot.cfg and an image file. For my 
embedded uses, I prefer the old way as it means the image is in the kernel 
(and can be animated too) and so is independent of bootloader, etc. i.e. 
you can get a splash screen with a simple pxeboot.

--
Stephen