On 1101792545 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
Michael Kukat wrote:
>

>Hm. _HOW_ are there cards supported then? XdecNetBSD? Can't be XFree86, becaus
>e
>this fiddles around directly with the cards. And those palette Problems were
>there with XFree86 and XdecNetBSD. You don't see it in a twm session with some
>xterms, but try starting KDE and you see what i mean :)

They're supported with XdecNetBSD.  Although, I haven't used them
since it was XalphaNetBSD---so perhaps something broke in the
meantime.  I remember fixing a couple of odd issues which might
be similar to this one.

>For security, it's definitely a good approach this way. Bot not for
>flexibility. I will have a look at the kernel stuff, now knowing about this,
>but due to the "performance" of the cards with XdecNetBSD, i don't think
>someone has fun with this using the machine as workstation as i do. So XFree86
>is, at least for the flexibility of supporting lots of cards, the better
>approach for users using the machine as desktop workstation. For servers not
>having to use different framebuffers, the kernel approach is okay, as you can
>finally disable the INSECURE flag (at least i think you can, if you don't need
>XFree86 :), and let the kernel handle all your hardware, like it always should
>have been.

Heh, the performance was never quite optimal yes.  I can't try the
cards any more, since I don't have my machines at my current place.
But, remember that the TGA series was specifically designed to
allow a userspace application to mmap(2) in the registers in the
right ways and securely access them while still having the kernel
broker access to things like DMA.  Many i386 cards are not designed
to allow this sort of thing to work...  (Or, what I'm saying is
that it should be possible to accelerate XdecNetBSD to full speed.)

--
    Roland Dowdeswell                      http://www.Imrryr.ORG/~elric/