From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Feb 18 08:50:50 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id IAA14416 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 08:50:50 -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 IAA14410 for ; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 08:50:43 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id JAA11201; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 09:47:12 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199702181647.JAA11201@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: pcvt/132 columns To: hm@kts.org Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 09:47:12 -0700 (MST) Cc: ccsanady@nyx.pr.mcs.net, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, FreeBSD-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Hellmuth Michaelis" at Feb 18, 97 11:03:54 am 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 > In the PC world, there is already a generic graphis driver for setting the > state of the board available, its called BIOS. The only problem the free > BSD's have, is to access it. > > If we could access the BIOS, it would be responsible for switching back and > forth into the card-supported video modes, and neither the console driver > nor the X server would have to care anymore about it. And the nifty thing about most INT 10 BIOS implementations ever since Paradise video cards came out in the early 80's, is that they disable all interrupts during BIOS processing so they can guarantee they don't put "sparklies" (remember "sparklies"?) on the screen by having the processor go and do something else and throwing their action out of the vertical retrace. And everyone knows, it's more important to avoid "sparklies" on the console screen than it is to process half a million FDDI or fast ethernet packets, right? ...Wait... that's not nifty. Really, INT 10 is a piece of shit and should not be used, even on NT or NetWare, if the system is supposed to function effectively as a server at all. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.