Re: [linux-fbdev] Is a FontCache worth implementing ?

[James S. <jsi...@li...>]

>> Using a image blitter you can translate that data from normal RAM to
>> the video card memory. The nice thing about a image blitter is you can
>> do depth translations (mono to depth X).
>
>Yes, that was killed my current (test) implementation : 16 colors
>mean 16 copies of each glyph. Yuck (8 Mb for 512 glyhs, 16x16 32bpp)

I agree with you about the PCI bus. Slow to go over. I want to maximize
fbcon as much as possible. I'm working on the removal of the
console_spinlock so we can use DMA. This will greatly speed up fbcon. I
need to rename that function. The goal is to draw some image. It depends on
the hardware how you approach it. I like to see AGP used by fbcon to do
the transfering of font images to the console. You can even make them
textures if you want. In fact I was thinking of doing that for the voodoo
1 card. It has 4 megs for the framebuffer, 4 megs for register space and 4
megs for texture space. So I could place font data in the texture space.
The big thing I like is the hardware translation from whatever to the
current depth. Some hardware has this seperate. I leave up to the driver
programmer how to approach this problem.

MS: (n) 1. A debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that
renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task. 2. A disease.

James Simmons  [jsi...@li...]               ____/|
fbdev/console/gfx developer                             \ o.O|
http://www.linux-fbdev.org                               =(_)=
http://linuxgfx.sourceforge.net                            U
http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net