Re: development of framebuffer driver hi res console

On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 22:17 +0200, Jeremie Le Hen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 01:21:50AM -0500, Sam Fourman Jr. wrote:
> > and in mt /etc/rc.conf I have
> > 
> > allscreens_flags="MODE_280"
> > 
> > note you should man vidcontrol before doing this.
> > 
> > just type vidcontrol -i at your system console for the correct mode.
> 
> I've always been puzzled by vidcontrol(8).  I've only been able to use
> 80x50.
> 
> Using "vidcontrol -i mode", I get 98 modes.  If I try MODE_292
> (1280x1024x32), I get the following message:
> % vidcontrol: cannot active raster display: Inapropriate ioctl for device
> 
> And this is the case for most of them.
> 
> > it isn't like gentoo or fedora, but it works for me.
> > I would REALLLY like to see better frame buffer support in FreeBSD
> 
> My experience with Linux framebuffer is quite bad.  I always disable it
> since backward scrolling (using less) is really, really slow.  If
> there happen to be a similar feature on FreeBSD, I hope we won't have
> this problem :).

Modeling anything after linux fbdev would be a terrible idea.  That code
should have died years ago, but a real modesetting model is only being
introduced now, sadly.

As for your specific performance issue, that's probably just due to the
developers of fbdev not understanding how graphics work, and trying to
memcpy around in framebuffer.  Don't do that.  You can memcpy from main
memory into framebuffer plenty fast, though, so no device-specific
acceleration is needed in console code.

-- 
Eric Anholt                             anholt_at_FreeBSD.org
eric_at_anholt.net                         eric.anholt_at_intel.com