An off-the-top-of-a-mildly-feverish-head reply to Andrew's messagew:

>With a kernel or two sitting in it, the root partition needs over 16M
>- mine's at 19M now w/2 kernels - perhaps it would be good to warn
>people of this & tell them to use a 32M root.

I find a 16M root is perfectly adequate. I keep five kernels and a
full /{bin,sbin,etc} on a 16M root partition. Then again I still have
stripped a.out binaries. Maybe the ELF symbol table is much bigger, or
maybe strip is broken.  Ted is the right person to check this one.


>Where's the best place to read-up on attacking a frame buffer to make
>X run?  What's the easiest one to attack?  It looks like there's
>already stuff in pmax/dev for the frame-buffers - is it just a matter
>of convincing X to build?  Has anybody yet tried to get Ultrix Xws or
>Xdec to run under Ultrix compat mode ... that's basically what the
>Sparc port does, right?  I'm really interested in getting X working,
>but I don't want to re-invent the wheel if anybody else has worked on
>it. 

I'd suggest hacking the NetSBD/pmax framebuffers to emulate either the
pre-Xws pmax/cfb interface (see, e.g., a vax qvss driver :)); or
emulating the Ultrix `framebuffer independent' interface that Xws
uses.  That way, anyone who wished (and was licensed) could use an
Ultrix Xserver binary.  [[I hope I've got the names correct: by Xws I
mean the `fb--independent'' interface from Ultrix 4.2, not the
fb-dependent interfaced used up to Ultrix 4.1, inclusive]].

I think the most work in the Xws interface is dithering the
cursor-sprite bitmaps appropriately. This would be more work
in the short-term but would probably be a win, long-term, if
we can use the X consortium's Ultrix configuration for X servers.

I did a couple of Ultrix-compatible framebuffer drivers for
Decstations for the V-kernel, and in a previous life I ported a qvss
driver to 4.3-Reno, which at the time did't seem to have one.  Sigh...
I just don't have time to do this.



> This is looking really WONDERFUL!

Well, gee, thanks. (I feel entitled to  take at least *some* of the
credit for the changes since last summer, if perhaps not `most' ...)

--Jonathan