On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 09:17:14PM +0100, Radek Kujawa wrote:
>  Now I'm under impression that it's impossible to write truely
> portable program using wsdisplay.

I'm not sure I follow this logic.
Wsdisplay is a kernel concept to get console output. It works for that just
fine.

It would do that even on hardware that would be completely lacking graphics
mode functionality.

I'm also not sure there is an urgent need - we had one primary consumer
of the missing interface - X - and that is a bitch, but managed to work
around the bus and device specific parts itself.

> I see three options now:
[..]
> - Extend /dev/fb functionality and port it to other platforms/drivers.

This is something I think we should do, for completely unrelated reasons.

> This would allow us to write better views support and fb interface is
> generaly better suited to draw more than terminal.

I don't see how it would do that.

> - Design something entirely new - _portable_ interface dedicated
> to drawing graphics, that could coexist with wscons/fb.

We could do that. Microsoft moved GDI inside the windows kernel, a long time
ago. We should implement DirectX for NetBSD too, while there.


Martin