In muc.lists.netbsd.port.sparc Michael wrote:

[ X / -current patches ]
>this will give you an accelerated wscons console and complete, 
>accelerated X11 (but no hardware-accelerated OpenGL, at least as long 
>as we don't have DRI) on the onboard graphics chip. 

How does "accellerated wscons" work?  I thought wscons just presents
a dumb frame buffer device to the X server?  Or can XFree86 figure out
"hey, behind this wscons, it's hiding an Mach64 chip, so let's use the
XFree86 hardware driver"?

I definitely lack some understanding how the pieces link together for
"X on wscons and hardware accelleration".

> The only remaining 
>problem is that the keyboard driver misses the first event.

Yep, same here (U10, FFB).  But that's really a minor thing.

>Support for FFB cards is on the way but I have no idea about its 
>current state.

I use wscons on U10/Creator3D with good success.  -current kernel,
kernel compiled with 

   # Creator3D
   ffb*           at mainbus0
   wsdisplay0     at ffb?
   # keyboard / mouse
   wskbd*          at kbd?                 # console ?
   wsmouse*        at ms?

   options         RASTERCONSOLE           # fast rasterop console
   options         RASOPS_CLIPPING
   options         FONT_GALLANT12x22       # the console font
   options         FFBDEBUG
   options         WSEMUL_SUN              # sun terminal emulation
   options         WSEMUL_VT100            # VT100 / VT220 emulation
   options         WSDISPLAY_DEFAULTSCREENS=1

and it works well.  As far as I understand, it's non-accellerated, though,
as the XFree86 ffb driver is not used, only the "wscons" driver.

>But beware - there are a few nasty problems in the native threads code 
>which occasionally crash the kernel, with X11 running you'd only see it 
>freeze. Big, threaded apps like Mozilla are pretty likely to trigger it 
>sooner or later. Light-weight stuff is pretty stable though.

Is there a way to get "kernel oops" messages to the serial console,
even if keyboard+monitor are connected to the system?  I have a PC with
a spare serial port available, and it would be useful to actually see
what happened, instead of just seeing "hmmm, frozen.  bad.  power-cycle
now."

gert
-- 
gert@greenie.muc.de   fax: +49-89-35655025   http://alpha.greenie.net/mgetty/

Excuse me, do you live around here often?