Driver development

Driver development

[Manousaridis Angelos]

Hello all,

I have a custom video board for a strongARM embedded platform. Its 
purpose is to decode MPEG video streams and display the video on a TV 
screen.
This board uses the Teralogic 751 chip for graphics blending and 
display. The TL751 is connected to an external SDRAM, for framebuffer 
and video storage. It has 4 overlay planes: two for video, one for 
graphics and one for a hw cursor.

I want to write a driver for some applications that require access to 
the graphics plane. These applications will write bitmaps to the 
framebuffer memory of the TL751. I want to avoid using custom 
interfaces, so I thought that it would be a good idea to implement a 
frame buffer device for that purpose.

While looking at the framebuffer API though, I found a some stuff that 
are not applicable for my case.
All that beam tracking and monitor synchronization fields for instance. 
The chip I am using does all that handling because the output is fixed 
to either PAL or NTSC. I want to be able to set these two modes, but I 
don't need all the details (timings, margins etc).
Another issue is with the console stuff. I am not interested in having a 
framebuffer console. All I want is to give apps an API to the 
framebuffer memory. I see a lot of work has been done towards the 
direction of splitting the fb device stuff and the fb console stuff, but 
can I write a fb driver with no reference to fbcon?

Is it possible to implement such a framebuffer driver?
I want to look at some code to understand how the API works. From the 
drivers included in the kernel tree (drivers/video), which are closest 
to what I am trying to do?

thanks in advance,

Manousaridis Angelos



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