From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Feb 18 08:30:36 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id IAA13268 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 08:30:36 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.50]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id IAA13241; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 08:30:29 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id JAA11155; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 09:27:01 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199702181627.JAA11155@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: pcvt/132 columns To: jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby) Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 09:27:01 -0700 (MST) Cc: ccsanady@nyx.pr.mcs.net, jdc@xinside.com, FreeBSD-hackers@freebsd.org, FreeBSD-current@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199702180500.VAA00752@lightside.com> from "Jake Hamby" at Feb 17, 97 09:00:50 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > The worst part about the Sun, though, was that > there's actually an OpenBoot FORTH (in other words INTERPRETED) program in > the card's ROM which is used to draw the characters out to the screen, > leading to painfully slow speeds (slower than even a 9600 baud terminal on > the SPARC 2's) and tremendous CPU utilization, although it seems that NetBSD > and Solaris manage to speed up the console somehow, compared to SunOS > (NetBSD actually has a "RASTERCONSOLE" in the kernel, which probably has > something to do with it). Look at the NetBSD console code. They did it by preemptively scrolling multiple lines at a time (4, I believe) when they hit LF at the end of the screen. The slowest part of the console code is the scrolling (easy to understand why, without a bit-blit or memory page offset selector to implement the scroll). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.