[Linux-fbdev-devel] console and overlay/underaly (was: Re: more penguins (fwd)

[Romain D. <do...@ir...>]

Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

> Here's a patch against 2.4.5 so we can display a decent number of
> penguins at boot time (wraps the display of the boot penguins when
> they can't all fit on one line).

Apparently there's some interest in marginaly useful feature like
displaying penguin. I was wondering if there could be an interest
in even less useful feature like overlay support. Like a full-color,
full screen penguin under your text console.

Such a feature isn't hard to hack: I have a hacked pm3fb that only
change a handful of lines. The hardware is set up as 32bpp, with
the upper 8 of each u32 being used for the ColorIndexed value used
at the console level. pm3fb is fully accelerated, so it's only
adding the hardware planemask. The other 24 bpp are full-color RGB
used when the CI color is 0 (background color), and are never touched
by the console subsytem. Any image put in these will appear as a
underlay :-) Given that software like fbi are usually broken and assume
32bpp is RGB8888, they can be directly used to put the underlay...

I don't think it's really something to be made standard part of the
API, but other might disagree :-)

The second (much less trivial, not yet implemented, and much
more useful) is to use the video capability of the hardware ;
the Permedia3 can overlay video (including blending) on the
framebuffer. This could be used for still background picture,
or for video overlay (fbtv from the xawtv package could
benefit from hardware YUV->RGB conversion...)

Any comments ?

-- 
DOLBEAU Romain               | l'histoire est entierement vraie, puisque
ENS Cachan / Ker Lann        |     je l'ai imaginee d'un bout a l'autre
do...@ir...             |           -- Boris Vian