Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 11:50:24 +0500 From: A JOSEPH KOSHY <koshy@india.hp.com> To: Chris Csanady <ccsanady@nyx.pr.mcs.net> Cc: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>, dawes@rf900.physics.usyd.edu.au (David Dawes), hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: pcvt/132 columns Message-ID: <199702190650.AA241535024@fakir.india.hp.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 18 Feb 1997 23:09:46 CST." <199702190509.XAA08828@nyx.pr.mcs.net>
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>>>> "Chris Csanady" <ccsanady@nyx.pr.mcs.net> writes > I was just browsing through some of the linux groups and noticed that > Metrolink donated their dynamic object loading system to the XFree86 > project. Perhaps once this gets integrated, it would not be nearly > as much trouble to implement a generic graphics driver of sorts in > the kernel.. The basic idea I believe is to bring in object code at run-time into a running program (the X server) allowing code for X extensions etc to be loaded on demand. This is a win on those platforms XFree runs on that don't support dynamic loading --- SVR3.2 comes to mind. Even today FreeBSD can theoritically support LKM's that could handle different video cards. However, the barrier to moving initialization into the kernel is the sheer amount of device dependent programming that needs to be done per graphics card. Perhaps if we could extract out just the device specific parts of the XFree86 initialization code and create LKMs we could be in a position to use the work being done by the XFree86 team. However the current code is not in a shape that could be tweaked easily to this purpose (too many X Server dependencies) Further the initialization code that comes with the XFree server does not support non-graphics mode initialization. Thus we can't acheive extended text modes with this approach anyway. Koshy <koshy@india.hp.com> My Personal Opinions Only.
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