Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] FB console clears with large white area at startup

[Sven <lu...@dp...>]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 10:26:08AM -0700, James Simmons wrote:
> 
> > > Except what actually happens is that most of the screen is cleared to white,
> > > and console messages appear on the bottom line of the white area. As the
> > > console scrolls the white area scrolls up the screen, though that part of it to
> > > the right of Tux remains as long as Tux remains.
> > 
> > I have the same problem with pm3fb.
> 
> the reason was discovered to be from calling set_var before
> register_framebuffer. 

Not sure about this one, because applying the patch from roman to 2.4.18 +
pm3fb did hang the kernel early one (before registering the fbdev i think, it
never switched away from the console text mode). That said, i don't get a
white space stuff, but a green/black vertical stripes with some char embedded
in the green ones.

> > i don't know, but while writing the pm3 X driver, i noticed that may board
> > will not save/restore the fonts correctly when doing MMIO (and when not doing
> > MMIO it would not work in dual pm3 configuration) so we (Well Alan Hourihane
> > actually) did change the code to read/save font memory using a special memcopy
> > instead of resorting to the vga interface, which seemed broken in this
> > respect. Maybe the pm2 chip shares this problem ?
> 
> Hm. The console system should be handling restoring the fonts. Unfortunely
> it doesn't. I can see this when I use the vesa framebuffer and X. 

Yes, it did not work for. The problem for X was that the vga mmio interface of
the chip was broken, so we copy the data by hand.

I would do the same for pm3fb, but i don't know where the char data is held in
the vga memory (which is part of the framebuffer memory, i think), and copying
all 64K of it like is done in the X driver would not help us.

Friendly,

Sven Luther