As I said before, finally I have made the first snapshot of graphics mode 
console driver available at http://kldp.org/~bangjy/vgafb .

The following features have been implemented so far:

	- Emulate 80x25 text mode in 640x400 graphics mode very 
	  accurately. Compare it with text mode wscons. :)
	- Use builtin font for ASCII.
	- Switching between virtual screens.
	- Compatible with (all of?) existing applications including X, 
	  mc, vi, etc.

Things to do include:

	- Support for encodings, Unicode/UTF-8, ISO-2022, EUC, and etc.
	  Basic code is already there (not included in this release), but 
	  I need to examine the wscons further.
	- Convert raw fonts to wsfont format. Currently I have two 
	  Korean fonts converted, and need Japanese Hiragana, Katakana, 
	  Chinese and other fonts for testing. 
	- Speed improvement. See the benchmark below.
	- Make it configurable via config(8) and add an option as 
	  "options VGAFRAMEBUFFERDISPLAY", "options VGARASTERCONSOLE" 
	  or "options MULTILINGUALCONSOLE"
	- Cleanup messy code.

Here is a simple benchmark result obtained with Cyrix 6x86-150 machine:

wscons:
	$ time ls -l /usr/bin
	real 0m0.462s
	user 0m0.057s
	sys  0m0.152s

new cons:
	$ time ls -l /usr/bin
	real 0m7.797s
	user 0m0.080s
	sys  0m7.694s

As seen above, it is about 17 times slower than text mode wscons. 
"Smooth Scrolling" technique might be helpful for speedup.

For datails see the home page. Any comments would be welcome and 
appreciated.

Jun-Young

--
Bang Jun-Young <bjy@mogua.org>