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Date:      03 May 1999 00:47:53 +0200
From:      Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@flood.ping.uio.no>
To:        Kelly Yancey <kbyanc@alcnet.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: new loader question / module question
Message-ID:  <xzpogk36qcm.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
In-Reply-To: Kelly Yancey's message of "Sun, 2 May 1999 16:00:20 -0400 (EDT)"
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9905021557360.35603-100000@kronos.alcnet.com>

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Kelly Yancey <kbyanc@alcnet.com> writes:
>   Also, it got me thinking? Is there a way to "through away" the
> informaiton after I'm done with it. For example, in the splash module,
> once you load the image into memory, it's stuck there forever (ie. the
> "feature" that you can re-use it as a screen saver because it is still
> in memory). I was under the impression that we don't page kernel memory
> and thus the image is wired into RAM all the time (it will never be
> paged). Please tell me I'm wrong...because if not, doesn't this seem like
> a Bad Thing?

Unfortunately, you're correct. What's more, the memory occupied by a
module is not reclaimed when the module is unloaded.

>   Thanks for all of your help! By the way? Is anyone working on improving
> the splash module.

To a certain degree, yes.

>                    With all the examining I've been doing of it recently,
> I would like to add the ability for it to scale the image to fit the
> screen size (rather than die of rimages which are too large).

I might look into it some day, but the result of scaling the image is
likely to be very ugly due to aliasing.

>                                                               I was also
> thinking about adding XPM support so I don't have to use Windows BMP
> files :)

You don't have to use BMP files; you can use PCX files instead (PCX is
the file format Paintbrush used before it got bought by Microsoft) by
loading splash_pcx instead of splash_bmp. You won't get a fadeout
effect, though; I left that part out of the PCX decoder because it
didn't work properly and I didn't feel like trying to understand or
debug the code.

BTW, those "Windows BMP files" are properly called DIBs (Device
Independent Bitmaps) and come in two slightly different variants: a
Windows version and an OS/2 version. I don't recall the differences in
format between the two.

A PNG decoder is also planned, but it's a lot more work than a PCX
decoder and I haven't found the time to finish it yet.

>          anyway, those  are just a couple of the ideas I thought I could
> implement to improve it, but I don't want to mess with it if someone else
> is already working on it.

Patches are always welcome.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@flood.ping.uio.no


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