On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, Mukund JB. wrote:

quoted

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Is there a generic low level driver that will interact with the
hardware?

Yes and No. Yes, because there are platform drivers that may work with
many cards (VESA, VGA16, OF).  You can consider them as generic.

Are you talking about the vesafb driver? this being  a generic driver,
Will this driver work on any video card? 

Yep, `VESA' means the vesafb driver. It works on any video card with a VESA 2.0
compliant BIOS.

If a card is VESA 2.0 complaint, is there a generic framebuffer driver
that will work on it? 

I assume VESA 2.0 standards will define hardware registers.

No, it's a BIOS standard. It standardizes how to talk to the BIOS to set a
(linear) graphics mode.

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However, the hardware specific specific driver will work only with a
particular chipset.

What chages from framebuffer driver to framebuffer driver?
I think its just hardware accessing.

Yep. But the way you program the graphics chip may differ a lot among different
graphics chips.

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What happens when I say startx at command prompt with XF86Config-4

file

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configured for framebuffer driver?

Is it like, When I say startx with XF86Config-4 file configured for
framebuffer driver, the video we get is a result of X server using

the

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framebuffer driver directly? Right?

Yes.

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In this case, Is there a video driver involved in getting the video
apart from the framebuffer driver?

The framebuffer driver itself touches the hardware, and usually it's

one

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driver per chipset.  However, the interface that is used by the
application
is standard.

Let's make this clearer.
The video I get after startx is running just on framebuffer driver?
There is no other video driver involved in the running video.right?

For unaccelerated operation, yes.

If you want hardware accelerated drawing operations, the X server still has to
known how to program the graphics chip. The frame buffer device takes care
about setting the video mode and color palette, and mapping video RAM only.

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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