At 2:01 AM -0500 12/3/99, Jason Thorpe wrote:

>NetBSD already has a generic framebuffer architecture.  It's called
>wscons, and scottr is nearing completion of mac68k support for it.

wscons is the cross-platform raster console driver. It will replace ite not
grf.

Some of the NetBSD ports have a frame buffer device "fb". I had thought
this was a sort of NetBSD standard but if you look, there is no standard
way in which any NetBSD port seems to handle frame buffers.

>In general, following the XFree86 lead in "architecture" is a bad
>idea.  True portability is not their strong suit.

The architecture of FB isn't driven by XFree86 but it is driven by the
frame buffer guys lead by Geert Uytterhoven. I find that the FB design is
quite complete and deals well with all of the wacko setups that various
video cards support. Having tried a few different frame buffer API models
myself it becomes immediately clear that any decent API converges towards
something that looks like FB anyway so it makes sense to create an
interface to something that is known to work.


____________________________________________________________________
 Michael Zucca - mrz5149@acm.org - http://www.mdc.net/~mrz5149/
 "I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose Freewill. "
  --Rush, Freewill
____________________________________________________________________