Re: also frustrated with the framebuffer and your matrox-card in 2.5.53? hack/patch available!

On Fri, 27 Dec 2002, Petr Vandrovec wrote:

On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 12:05:38PM +0100, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

quoted

On Fri, 27 Dec 2002, Petr Vandrovec wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 07:47:52PM +0000, James Simmons wrote:

quoted

Petr is expressing his political view. It has nothing to do with technical 
arguments. In fact I place a bet. I will port the matrox driver and it 
will have the same functionality as the previous driver except for text 
mode support. If I can't do it I will not only revert the changes but I 

Yes. Without text mode support. But without textmode support that driver is
of no use for me because of it is not compatible with VMware then.

What exactly in the new fbdev API is preventing you from having text mode
support?

Problem is that in new framework driver does not get in touch with characters.

Oops, I forgot about that...

It gets only prepared bitmap passed to imageblit callback (because of fbcon_putcs
unconditionally calls accel_putcs, which does character -> bitmap conversion). Of 
course it is possible to convert bitmap back to character number, but it is very 
time consuming, and it looks illogical to me first convert character number to its
graphic image, and then convert graphic image back to character number... Not even
talking about 9x16 character cell.

Next problem is that fbdev driver is no more notified (if I understand code correctly)
about font changes, so it even cannot upload correct font into the hardware, and
so it must rely on accel_putcs at the time of character print.

So we need to find a way to provide putcs() and font operations by a fbdev,
without sucking in the whole fbcon layer.

Basically you need putcs(), which is really just a simple way to do multiple
image blits in one call, and set_font(), right? And if the fbdev doesn't
provide those, we must fallback to accel_putcs().

James (and Petr, of course), what do you think? And I guess this will make
Davem happy as well.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds