Hello,

> Uhm, does it use custom "text mode" emulation?  If memory serves, this
> makes it 3 text mode emulations in the kernel, the other two are hpcfb
> anf raster vga.  We should really make this MI, so that all wscons
> drivers can use it.

I'm not quite sure what "custom text mode" would be but i imagine VGA
raster display would use same approach. Vast majority of wscons code is
MI anyway - it's the framebuffer specific part that is set up in each
driver and even though these are similar (actually the same for dumb
linear framebuffers) between drivers i don't think there's much
doplication of code going on.

Framebuffer driver basically sets up the hardware and regsters it in
kernel and provides the minimum needed for wscons to work - font
rendering (in case of real text mode this wouldn't be necessary,
obviously), copy and erase of blocks of character cells, color/palette
changing and cursor operation. Higher level stuff (which is MI) does all
the magic then. Drivers are pretty much hardware specific and different
drivers provide different set of features (for example LCG and LCSPX
drivers allow different fonts to be used whereas old SMG driver
currently only supports single hardcoded gawd ugly font
<offtopic>speaking of fonts, i wish there was a nice 16x32 typeface
avaliable freely somewhere :-)))</offtopic>).
 
> PS: sparc doesn't use wscons yet, anyway.

Neither did/do Vaxen :-) I don't know anything about the keyboard part
of things but the infrastructure was there already so all it took was a
framebuffer driver to get wscons working.

Blaz Antonic
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