Re: Help with patch for vesafbd support again?

Kendall Bennett
2003-03-19T19:15:06Z

"Randy.Dunlap" <rddunlap@osdl.org> wrote:

> > 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.
>
> Can (will) you say *why* you want this? I can't find that info here.

Why? I thought that would be clearly obvious. Right now with the VESA
framebuffer device driver you cannot change the mode on the graphics card
once the system has started. You are also restricted to only working with
VESA 2.0 cards that have functional 32-bit protected mode functions if
you wish to support panning and proper color map progamming, which is not
always possible (believe me, I know of many that will not work unless you
play magic with the selectors passed to the functions; something Linux
cannot do).

With the vesafbd driver it is possible to use 'fbset' to change the
active console display mode at any time after the system has booted, as
well as use the fallback BIOS functions to program the palette and pan
the display. Not as fast as the VBE 2.0 functions, but if the VBE 2.0
functions are broken this is a good compromise.

On top of that I already mentioned the fact that it would allow
framebuffer console drivers to be developed inside the daemon that could
be implemented using XFree86 4.0 modules if desired (ie: sharing source
code with XFree86 rather than having completely separate framebuffer
console modules developed for all the same graphics cards).

> and can you post the patch file (source code) that you have
> somewhere, like a web page (not email if it's large)?

The patch is not very large. However I have put the original release
files up on my private web page for people to download and examine:

http://www.scitechsoft.com/~kendallb/vesafbd/vesafb-20000122.patch

http://www.scitechsoft.com/~kendallb/vesafbd/vesafbd-0.1.tar.gz

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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