Re: console font limits

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Kyle Moffett wrote:
> 
> Actually I think the real problem was that "KD_GRAPHICS" got overloaded
> to mean "some userspace program is probably poking at the GPU in very
> direct ways possibly including /dev/mem".  As such it really isn't safe
> at all for the kernel to write stuff to the screen in that situation;
> you could turn a panic()+reboot-after-30-secs into an unrecoverable hard
> PCI bus lockup.  IIRC there were at least a couple chipsets which had
> that problem with X.  If we can implement enough APIs for X to do all of
> its stuff from userspace without iopl() or /dev/mem then we could
> probably bring back the option for dumping oopses to screen in
> KD_GRAPHICS mode, but otherwise it'll just cause more headaches.
> 

It never meant anything *BUT* that, to the best of my knowledge.  That
was certainly the original meaning of KD_GRAPHICS.

	-hpa