Subject: rasops and acceleration
To: None <tech-kern@NetBSD.org>
From: Garrett D'Amore <garrett_damore@tadpole.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/14/2006 13:45:16
Looking thru the code, I notice that rasops seem to be limited to
handling of emulated displays.  I.e. it doesn't appear that the
rasops/wsdisplay framework can export anything other than framebuffer
memory to graphics applications.

I want to support console graphics applications, and I'd like them to be
able to use the acceleration functions that are already present in
rasops (plus maybe a few others yet to be defined, like line-drawing,
xor'ing, etc.)

As far as I can see, Xwsfb can't take advantage of any of this stuff,
but it would also be cool if it could.  2D acceleration for Xwsfb would
be nice, I think.

Is anyone working on this, or interesting in working on it?  (I'm afraid
to ask this next bit, but here goes: Any strenous objections to adding
this kind of support to the rasops framework?)

Basically, I'm thinking that the acceleration mode routines in rasops
can look at the mode (emulated text or not), and either use pixel
coordinates or character coordinates.  (Right now they only use
character coordinates).

I guess another way to do it would be to have some kind of new
framework, rasaccel?, that exposed similar routines, but did it only for
bitmapped displays *not* running in text emulation mode.  But I hate to
invent a whole new framework.

-- 
Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer
Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division,
General Dynamics C4 Systems
http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/
Phone: 951 325-2134  Fax: 951 325-2191