From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Geert Uytterhoeven Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2018 11:07:27 +0000 Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] vt: no blinking on console, 256/24-bit color improvements Message-Id: List-Id: References: <20180718030152.kdq53mwpdfusvwl5@angband.pl> <20180721074319.GA30454@kroah.com> <20180721213843.wkculy5cdrrbmuij@angband.pl> <20180723104151.z3lasjmdd3ubh2sc@angband.pl> In-Reply-To: <20180723104151.z3lasjmdd3ubh2sc@angband.pl> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Adam Borowski Cc: Greg KH , Jiri Slaby , linux-console@vger.kernel.org, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz , Linux Fbdev development list , Linux Kernel Mailing List Hi Adam, On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 12:42 PM Adam Borowski wrote: > On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 10:53:29AM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote: > > On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 11:39 PM Adam Borowski wrote: > > > Technically, every console can be made to blink by drawing/clearing affected > > > characters a few times per second, but that'd be quite a waste of coding > > > time and kernel size. There's a reason browsers dropped support for > > > and text-decoration:blink. > > > > It's very simple and fast to implement in fbcon for FB_TYPE_PLANES or > > FB_TYPE_INTERLEAVED_PLANES and FB_VISUAL_PSEUDOCOLOR ;-) > > Interesting... I'm still not going to do the effort to implement that > (which would require learning fbdev internals first), though. But while I > dislike this feature, someone else might want it. > > The main problem here is that there are only 8 or 7 bits available for > attributes, thus it's better to use them for something more useful. And > here, fbcon already interprets this bit as bright background, thus this > patchset makes vt use it instead of non-existant blink. Even better that they are mutually exclusive ;-) So it can work fine with only 4 bitplanes. That means bitplane 3 means either bright background (palette[8..15] are the extra-bright versions of palette[0..7]) or blinking (palette[8..15] alternate between palette[0..7] and all zeroes). > There'll be more bits available once attributes get migrated into uniscr -- > either 11 or 32 bits depending on chosen implementation. But I still > wouldn't go too wild with them: the console is meant for recovery tasks as > on any properly working system you can have an X terminal configured for > pixel-to-pixel identical behaviour as anything console can do. Thus, only > cheap improvements to attributes make sense. This patchset is currently at > +3 net lines, this certainly counts as cheap. Assumed all those systems are sufficiently powerful to still run X (said the guy who once ran X with mem=2M on his Amiga, just to prove it could work ;-) Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds