From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2016 11:40:26 +0000 Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] staging: remove fbdev drivers Message-Id: <1481283626.27965.9.camel@kernel.crashing.org> List-Id: References: <1479888193-23908-1-git-send-email-tomi.valkeinen@ti.com> <1481158879.26959.41.camel@kernel.crashing.org> <20161208101005.6ufl3d4qvwprosju@phenom.ffwll.local> <1481232519.26959.49.camel@kernel.crashing.org> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Dave Airlie Cc: Thomas Petazzoni , Linux Fbdev development list , Teddy Wang , Greg Kroah-Hartman , LKML , dri-devel , Tomi Valkeinen , Sudip Mukherjee , Arnaud Patard On Fri, 2016-12-09 at 10:08 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote: > What are people using fbcon for that needs acceleration, this is where I get > a bit lost. > > It's a console, if you aren't sshing into the machine. > > It's main purpose should just be for gathering oopses and you've a lot better > chance of getting an oops if you don't have some sketchy gpu accel in the way. There are other uses for systems running Linux than being a server or desktop :-) > The acceleration that most of the 2D things provide isn't ever that > great, and shadowing is a lot more effective if done properly. Not with a 400Mhz ARM9 processor on a fairly high res display. In these case basic old things like color expansion for font rendering, bit blits and solid fills for scrolls work beautifully. Anyway I just realized that the ARM side of the AST GPU doesn't have the accel bits at all anyway, only the host side, so I'm back to just a dumb FB. I still want to avoid the copies though. > It's a feature > that kernel ppl obsess over but I don't get a lot of real world feedback, > (booting 9000 scsi nodes with debug on takes a long time was possibly > something I heard once, and I think we resolved). Ben.