Re: [Linux-fbdev-devel] Supporting various depth

[Matan Ziv-Av <ma...@sv...>]

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, James Simmons wrote:

> > I guess it is more limited by the software, isn't it ? Is it
> > possible to have vgacon and fbcon active at the same time with 2.4.+ kernels ?
> 
>  Not with 2.4.X :-( The console system uses a gloal struct consw
> (conswitchp). You really have to hack up the console system to get it to
> work. For me I just rewrote the whole thing.
>  For ruby it is possible but I haven't done it yet. The biggest problem
> right now is the current vgacon I have. Lots of global variables. I like
> to be able to pass the register region and the text memory region to
> vgacon. By default they would be 0x3C0 for the registers and A000 for the
> text memory region. Well something like that. These regions are different
> on different platforms. Now you could write a small wrapper that passes in
> the pci regions. This is what I plan to do for the NVIDIA text mode
> driver I have. It pretty much is vgacon except it uses the pci regions
> instead. I also plan to vgacon firmware independent as well.

This won't exactly work - there are some ways to access the vga
registers - io (might be remapped from 0x3c0-03df to other address),
memory mapped (at any address) or other (nvidia uses other). Also the
memory in the linear aperture is organized differently (at least on the
nvidia) then the memory at 0xa0000-0xc0000. The solution is probably for
the chipset drivers to supply functions (incrtc, outcrtc, etc.)



-- 
Matan Ziv-Av.                         ma...@sv...