Subject: Re: debugger on non-normal consoles...
To: Ted Lemon <mellon@hoffman.vix.com>
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@chassiron.ensta.fr>
List: tech-kern
Date: 06/27/1997 16:51:21
On Jun 26, Ted Lemon wrote
> 
> It would be *truly* winning if the kernel could be told whether the
> console is in a graphics or character-cell mode, where the frame
> buffer is, how big pixels are, and so on, and if this could be
> settable via a privileged ioctl, so that if I'm running X and suddenly
> dump out into ddb, the kernel can Do The Right Thing.
> 

I don't think this can be easily done with PC-like SGVA boards, because
you need a driver for each board if they are not in a standart
VGA resolution. The best way to do this would be to swicth back in text
mode, but I don't know if there is a generic way of doing this for all
the VGA boards, whihout asking X or the video bios to do it for us.

However I'd really like to have this functionality, as I'm almost all
the time running X.

--
Manuel Bouyer, MASI, Universite Paris VI.
email: bouyer@masi.ibp.fr
       bouyer@ensta.fr
--