On Fri, 9 May 1997, Graham, James wrote:

> der Mouse wrote:
> 
> >#Or, of course, you can drop the card into graphics mode and draw
> >#whatever you please.  I'm not sure _that_ would be something I'd advise
> >#putting into the kernel, though - if you want X, you know where to find
> >#it. :-)
> 
> The SPARC port comes close -- the only difference is that the SPARC
> consoles don't have a separate graphics and text mode.  Making the
> console bitmapped would probably not be such a big deal if not for
> the fact that there appear to be an infinite number of PC motherboard/
> BIOS/graphix adapter card combinations which makes planning
> for this sort of thing rather difficult.

I'd also be worried about the performance.  It only takes one operation to
write a character into the text-mode screen - and an entire screen can be
coppied with one memcpy of 4000 bytes.  The card/bios also takes care of
some other things (although I don't know the specifics), such as cusor
drawing, and page flipping.  I think it would be a significant load on the
kernel to ask it to handle those things.  It would be an interesting
option though, but I guess that is what X is all about...

Rick

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