Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] Some questions

[Geert U. <ge...@li...>]

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 -- ge...@li...

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