In message <200103302132.NAA21156@kookie.cobalt.com>Chris Johnson writes
>
>See drivers/char/lcd.[hc] in one of our mips kernel
>source rpms on ftp.cobaltnet.com.  For example:
> ftp://ftp.cobaltnet.com/pub/experimental/SRPMS/kernel-2.0.34C53_SK-3.src.rpm

Thanks!  The code is pretty straightforward.

>We access the LCD through a set of programs we call
>the panel utiities, but we don't publish source these.
>An intrepid explorer should be able to do something
>useful based on the driver source.

No problem.  I have it coming up and replacing the "Starting Up"
string with "NetBSD 1.5" and displaying "Ready to Power Off"
when it is halted.  I sent off a set of patches to somebody
on the list who was curious, but I'm not quite sure where to go
from here.

I'm using the Linux raw writes to KSEG1 memory, which works okay,
but might not be as clean as all that.  I was thinking about 
bus_space-ifiying the stuff, but I wasn't sure it was worth the
trouble, nor did it seem like we'd be accessing this same device
via another bus.

Finally, I was mulling over user-space access to the stuff.
I could probably duplicate the Linux interface reasonably
closely, but that's fairly useless if there are no programs
that use it!  :-)  I was also considering mimicking the Matrix
Orbital LCD devices, which are accessed via a serial interface.
That way, we could get something like lcdproc going.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Kevin
kml@dotrocket.com
kml@patheticgeek.net