On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 16:06:17 -0700, Blaz Antonic wrote:

> > the whole graphics framebuffer.  The former would work but would
> > violate least surprise, in that users would expect to get back what
> 
> As Mouse knows already we (at NetBSD/vax) emulate character cell display
> for console operation on all supported framebuffers - attributes and
> characters are stored for any number of virtual consoles and wscons does
> all the magic on console switch - all you have to do is to provide
> function that renders text, positions cursor and erases/copies rows and
> columns. Different framebuffers require different implementation of the
> latter, for example:
> 
> SMG is dumb framebuffer and uses CPU to do everything
> LCG is accelerated framebuffer and uses hardware font rendering, copy
> and erase (all console operations are fully accelerated)
> LCSPX is currently doing copy/erase in hardware but font rendering is
> done by CPU (docs for this thing are made of unobtanium :-()
> 
> Same underlying principle of emulated character cells ("text mode") is
> used for all these drivers. Perhaps you sparc guys shoudl check out one
> of those drivers and use it as a skeleton for sprc console, there is
> very little arch-specific stuff in there. If anybody is interested in
> that mail me and i'll send you LCSPX driver (don't refer to the one in
> current source tree, it lacks all the important features) which is
> probably the best one to adapt - it supports different wsfonts, colors
> and all and is easier to understand than LCG one and yet with all the
> goodies.

Uhm, does it use custom "text mode" emulation?  If memory serves, this
makes it 3 text mode emulations in the kernel, the other two are hpcfb
anf raster vga.  We should really make this MI, so that all wscons
drivers can use it.

PS: sparc doesn't use wscons yet, anyway.

SY, Uwe
-- 
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