Re: NetBSD 1.3 - X on P-IV

[Ignatios Souvatzis <is%jocelyn.rhein.de@localhost>]

> On 15-Feb-98, Fergus O'Hea wrote:
> 
> >Does anyone know if the Picasso IV support in the latest
> >NetBSD release includes hardware acceleration for
> >scrolling, blitting, etc?
> 
> A comment in grf_cl.c states that blitter support is still to be done.
> That would explain why text scrolling is so slow.

Err....

Text scrolling shouldn't be slow for the PC-chipset graphics boards, even if
not blitted in hardware but by the CPU. Thats just 16 bit _per character_ to
move.

The graphics scrolling is NOT done by the kernel, but by the X server (if
it knows how to)... thats the reason why these ioctls aren't implemented for
most of the boards.

Yes, there are good reasons to do it this way. For the fast blitting engines,
you don't want to have one system call overhead per blitting operation.

Regards,
        Ignatios