[PATCH 0 of 2] fbcon: blinking text fix and implementation

[PATCH 0 of 2] fbcon: blinking text fix and implementation

[Stefano Stabellini]

Hi all,
I have recently found out that there is a small bug in fbcon handling
the background color.
The forth bit of the background color is the blink property bit, not the
intensity bit, as for the foreground color.
Therefore it shouldn't be included in the background color.
I also wrote a very simple implementation for blinking text in fbcon,
using the flashcursor function to scan the buffer for blinking chars.
Any suggestion or critic is very welcome, but don't be too hard :)

Cheers,

Stefano Stabellini

Re: [PATCH 0 of 2] fbcon: blinking text fix and implementation

[Pavel Machek]

On Tue 2008-07-01 16:38:07, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have recently found out that there is a small bug in fbcon handling
> the background color.
> The forth bit of the background color is the blink property bit, not the
> intensity bit, as for the foreground color.
> Therefore it shouldn't be included in the background color.
> I also wrote a very simple implementation for blinking text in fbcon,
> using the flashcursor function to scan the buffer for blinking chars.
> Any suggestion or critic is very welcome, but don't be too hard :)

I'd prefer to call that 'feature' and leave it alone. Burning cpu
power to provide annoying blinking text is at least questionable...

-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

Re: [PATCH 0 of 2] fbcon: blinking text fix and implementation

[Stefano Stabellini]

Pavel Machek wrote:

> I'd prefer to call that 'feature' and leave it alone. Burning cpu
> power to provide annoying blinking text is at least questionable...
> 


I knew someone would have replied something like this, sooner or later;
this is why I sent two patches instead of just one.
The first one is a bugfix, the second one is the implementation of a
feature that some are not really missing.

Anyway, I am not burning so much cpu power: I have implemented a very
simple flag mechanism to scan the screen only when blinking text is
added to the screen or if we are scrolling.
The screen buffer is not so big, but if you are so concerned about
performances, I can implement a more efficient way to know whether we
need to scan the screen or not...