On Sat, 2002-11-02 at 07:29, James Simmons wrote:

quoted

James,

I tried the patch, and it does produce a cleaner and smaller driver.
Overall, I like it. Some observations:

1. Without the fb_set_var() hook, switching from X messes up the
console.  I would guess this will be addressed by the console?

fbcon_switch has to be rewritten. I'm going threw the process of cleaning
up the upper fbcon layer. Its such a mess. Yuck!!!

Thank goodness for this :)  I was already thinking of adding an 'Option
Usefbdev' for the xfree86 driver.
 

quoted

2. Console panning/wrapping does not work.  updatevar includes a check
"if (con == info->currcon)", and my guess is info->currcon is obsoleted
so the check always fails.

It worked before. Strange. Do you mean for you console panning doesn't
work on the visiable VC or a non visible VC?

I grepped the source for currcon, and did not see any instances where
it's being updated.  So, I removed the "if (con == info->currcon)" line
and panning worked again for the current console.  However, switching to
another console screws up the viewport again.  The viewport will be
restored if I scrolled past yres_virtual.

Perhaps, I should apply your console patches?  I haven't done that yet.

quoted

3. fbdev can be loaded without taking over the console.  After running
an fb-based application, exiting fbdev messes up the vga console
(actually hangs the system).  Should the fbdev driver provide the
capability to restore the VGA state then, ie at info->fb_release?

Yes!!! Of course there is the issue is the framebuffer that actual one
used for vgacon or is it independent, thinking multihead here.

I was trying to confirm if vgacon should restore its own state or not.
 
But this one is neat :)  I added VGA save/restore state routines to
fb_open() and fb_release().  I was able to boot to a VGA console, fired
up XFBDev and DirectFB and exited back again to a VGA console.  DirectFB
came back without problems, XFBDev needed a console reset.  

I guess the save/restore state routines will only be needed for graphics
card with a VGA core.  I think multiple graphics card or multi-head
systems will not be affected since the driver will only be
saving/restoring its own hardware anyway.

quoted

4. The initial font loaded is 8x8. It seems that 8x16 fonts are limited
for the SGI console console only.  Any reason why?

I have no idea why that is. You can select a differnt font.

You have this in Kconfig in the 'console' directory.

config FONT_8x16
	bool "VGA 8x16 font" if FBCON_FONTS   
	depends on FB && SGI_NEWPORT_CONSOLE=y

I changed the '&&' operator to '||' in my case.

quoted

5.  The cfb_* drawing functions still behave erratically, especially in
emacs.  Geert has made some versions that work correctly for me.  This
was discussed in a thread sometimes ago.

Where are the patchs. I like to incorporate them into BK.

The patch exceeded 40K uncompressed, so here's a link:

http://i810fb.sourceforge.net/draw_ops.diff.gz

The diff is against 2.5.45 plus your fbdev.diff.

Tony