Re: Some questions

On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, James Simmons wrote:

On a personal note. Many fbdev drivers in 2.4.X where also broken in that 
only the boot mode worked. This is where the fbset mode database in 
userland hack came in (/etc/fb.modes). This is horriable. Even with that 

Do you remember how modes were set before the existence of fbset? I guess not
:-)

A driver could support up to 31 modes (cfr. the old minors). You changed mode
by touch'ing the /dev/fb0my_favorite_mode special device that corresponded to
the mode you wanted.

userland database I often couldn't change video modes after booting. 

Ugh, those are serious driver bugs....

We should split the monitor programing stuff out from stuff like bpp etc.
Now if you think about it we can do things like change the bpp without 
having to redo the monitor programming. This is the flaw with the old and 
even the new api. 

You could have done that from the beginning. Just look at which fields have
changed and which haven't.

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



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