From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Richard Hirst Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 10:30:33 +0000 Subject: [Linux-ia64] framebuffer console Message-Id: List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org Hi, I've been trying to use the framebuffer console to display simple graphics with only partial success. I'm using an nVidia Quadro2 card, and a 2.4.9 kernel. Would be nice to use CONFIG_FB_VESA so I was graphics card independent, but there is some x86 assembler in that source, and I believe it relies on video mode switching being done before the kernel starts as well. So, I've compiled with CONFIG_FB_RIVA, and am experimenting with fbi, a simple image viewer for the framebuffer console. This mmaps the framebuffer memory, and tries to memcpy() in to it. That reliably causes hard crashes and spontaneous system reboots. If I hack fbi to do lseek/write on /dev/fb0 rather than mmap(), it seems to work ok. When using mmap() I sometimes see parts of my image on the screen before it crashes, and the pattern of bits that are drawn (or not) indicate that some small blocks of data (cachelines?) are not written to the video memory while other similar sized blocks are written. As the system crashes so badly, I guess the missing blocks are written elsewhere. The other thing that struck me as odd (but unrelated) was that on boot I get two penguins at the top of the screen, where I'd expected only one.. So, has anyone else played with framebuffer console, and been more successful than me? Is the problem I'm seeing likely to be specific to my graphics card, or something more generic? Thanks, Richard