-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, On Jan 23, 2011, at 1:55 PM, David Young wrote:
On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 08:15:19AM -0500, Michael wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, On Jan 22, 2011, at 7:57 AM, Christopher Berardi wrote:I don't know if this is even possible, but -- could NetBSD be setup to either have a *console* session (using a program like window, screen, or tmux) spread over two or more monitors? Or, could it be setup to have a separate tty assigned to each monitor (e.g., tty1 on monitor 1, tty2 on monitor 2, etc.) and then convienent hotkeys be assigned to 1) switch between ttys (like it currently uses ctrl-alt-[1-9]) and 2) switch between active monitors (e.g., ctrl-alt-shift-[1-9])?Sort of, but probably not on i386 thanks to firmware limitations. First, the vga driver only supports one instance but there are other drivers that have no such limit. The problem is that most of these drivers depend on the firmware to initialise the graphics chip and run with whatever graphics mode they find. On sparc for example the firmware will setup all connected graphics devices and NetBSD will support tty output on whatever it has drivers for. On other architectures it's hit and miss - OpenFirmware may or may not setup additional devices, if it does we can usually use them.Michael,Maybe I am misinformed, but I thought that it was possible in principlefor NetBSD to initialize a VGA adapter using the same BIOS video entry point as the system BIOS uses during boot.
'In principle'. You still need a real mode emulator of VM to actually run each card's BIOS. This may all be different with EFI though.
Then i386 could use every available framebuffer regardless of whether or not the system BIOSinitialized it. What do you think?
The other problem is that the vga driver has to use the legacy vga registers and memory ranges which also makes using more than one of them rather complicated since they're at fixed addresses and enabling/ disabling them is something that every chip does differently.
have fun Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iQEVAwUBTTzKx8pnzkX8Yg2nAQINKAf9GshUalfwhPMMjq0klfYgd5AFMfK3H3mB hzcC8BFN/Of23C9Jejx4Ti5bF19IPkEEnpBWOYCack2ZDBbZplAifMang3yJerNn xab2nx7iGTgObwFWJJcQqhyhgbzZu8itLqyDpXqM+fqmr8n+N3H9DHdy9NCSEZTB Rq2lzTm28g4UGSewZCcJaGFCnRXIaoUTuTGLVR5VoLv5MK4XmUeVfU7PIi3J4QKE daT28lezGNwF7Sp1HceygT+WO+9slF/ATqts10cbocvU5z2avap4Mk70AfeZ9hzK ZKXPSWOmCrbDBO2OO4fJFtCW6VW9V3+LbHNkXSRI6r5deeeggw1lNQ== =vrgc -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----