From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Kendall Bennett" Subject: Help with Aki Laukkanen's vesafbd project? Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 11:32:09 -0800 Sender: linux-fbdev-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net Message-ID: <3E785539.23463.8FE8545@localhost> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Return-path: Received: from adsl-63-195-13-70.dsl.chic01.pacbell.net ([63.195.13.70] helo=mail.scitechsoft.com) by sc8-sf-list1.sourceforge.net with esmtp (Cipher TLSv1:DES-CBC3-SHA:168) (Exim 3.31-VA-mm2 #1 (Debian)) id 18vjIc-0003qs-00 for ; Wed, 19 Mar 2003 11:32:30 -0800 Received: from KENDALLB (adsl-63-195-13-78.dsl.chic01.pacbell.net [63.195.13.78]) by mail.scitechsoft.com (8.12.8/8.12.5) with ESMTP id h2JJWrPD030230 for ; Wed, 19 Mar 2003 11:32:53 -0800 Content-description: Mail message body Errors-To: linux-fbdev-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: linux-fbdev-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Hi Guys, I am re-posting this message here that I originally posted on the kernel mailing list. It is probably more appropriate to discuss the details of this project here: Well I managed to finally dig up the old code that Aki Laukkanen developed sometime in early 2000. Unfortunately Aki died sometime in January 2001, so his work on the vesafbd daemon and patches to the vesafb device driver were lost - until now. I would like to revive this project, and the code I received from Matan Ziv-Av still configures and compiles correctly on Red Hat 8.0. I need to patch the latest kernel vesafb driver, but I think his patch is very old (probably around 2.2.14 timeframe). I am grabbing the 2.2.14 code to see if the patch will apply to that code, and then try to port the patch to the latest kernel release. Which brings up the first question. What kernel version should I patch against? 2.4.x or 2.5.x? However since I am not that familiar with the patching mechanism for the Linux kernel, would someone more familiar with this be willing to help out? I would like to modify the vesafb module in the kernel to optionally support the vesafbd daemon if it is present on the system, if not it will function as it does today. If vesafbd is present, it will be used to provide extended features to the default VESA framebuffer console driver. I would also like to generalise the daemon module a bit such that it does not need to be a VESA specific daemon, but could in fact contain it's own hardware interfacing module. For instance the daemon could use XFree86 loadable driver modules to implement the functions rather than the VESA interface code, which would also open up the option of doing accelerated screen blits using the existing XFree86 driver modules. Hence I was thinking that the name 'vesafbd' for the daemon is a misnomer and should probably be changed to something else like 'fbcond' or something. Any suggestions? Or should we just leave it as 'vesafbd' even though it could be updated to support more than just the VESA BIOS interface? Also the code I have right now for the daemon relies on the /dev/vesafb special file to have been created, which is used as the communication mechanism between the modified vesafb kernel driver and the daemon code. The daemon simply constantly reads from /dev/vesafb for command packets to process and writes the results to /dev/vesafb. Some people suggested in the past that a better approach might be to either use extended ioctl()'s to the existing /dev/fb special file, and have the kernel module sleep until it needs to do something, or use other polling methods (of which I am not familiar). I would like some guidance here as to the best way to implement this daemon if people think it should be changed. Finally, before I embark on this project, will this patch will be accepted into the kernel source code tree? I would hate to spend my time on it only to find out that the kernel developers don't like it and won't accept it. Regards, --- Kendall Bennett Chief Executive Officer SciTech Software, Inc. Phone: (530) 894 8400 http://www.scitechsoft.com ~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~ ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Does your code think in ink? You could win a Tablet PC. Get a free Tablet PC hat just for playing. What are you waiting for? http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr5043en