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Hello,

>     ml> should we preserve the old driver somehow so people who want
>     ml> it can still have 8bit?
>=20
> do you mean support for running the framebuffer itself in 8bit mode?
> or do you mean some kinda fancy FFB-quirky support for 8bit visuals
> when the framebuffer is in 24bit mode, like so that xfishtank will
> work for example?  (from DESCR it looks like xfishtank is fixed now,
> but a few years ago it used to be simply impossible to run xfishtank
> unless your framebuffer was running in 8bit mode)

FFB supports both 8 and 24 bit at the same time. It actually provides a
32bit aperture (24bit + alpha), one for 8 bit and a control plane that
selects for each pixel where it comes from, which palette to use etc. (
the ffb2 supports 32 palettes IIRC so unless you have 33 windows with
8bit depth and different palettes you won't see colour flickering ) -
nothing quirky about that, as far as an app is concerned and
performance-wise that /is/ an 8bit and a 32bit framebuffer.=20
( for correctness' sake - the ffb maps a few more apertures, one set
that accesses memory directly, one that goes through the 3DRAM ALU and
others )

I don't know about xfishtank but the hardware support for 8bit is useful
for things like Basilisk II or other programs that emulate hardware with
8bit graphics - no colour space conversion necessary.

XRender is something else, mainly it's used as an interface for possibly
hardware-accelerated alpha blending ( very useful for but not limited to
anti-aliased text ), the new driver adds hardware support for this. It
has a few problems though and I'm not at all sure they're really in the
driver - anti-aliased text is for some reason drawn with red and blue
components swapped, but other images drawn via XRender are fine, it's
/only/ text and it affects both GTK and KDE apps so it's probably in
Xft, freetype or something like that and not the driver itself.

have fun
Michael

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