Ok, this may be a silly question. I am not a kernel/fbdev hacker, so I may ignore some relevant issues. But after many researches, I can't see why it would be impossible for the vesafb driver to handle modes switching.
According to my understanding of this stuff, vesafb mode setting is possible only during real mode, via a boot argument, set by bios interrupts, which prevent from changing it later (if I said something wrong, please correct me.) But what about the xfree86 driver ? It seems to do its job via the VBE bios of the card. What would prevent vesafb from doing the same ? I know vesafb only supports VBE 2.0, not 3.0. I couldn't find the VBE 2.0 documentation, but in VBE 3.0 one, protected mode is supported.
I would see this as a great improvement, because of the really little number of cards actually supported by vesafb.
Regards,
Gaël D.
-------------------------------------------------------
The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004
Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration
See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn