Date: Sat, 29 Jun 1996 15:35:44 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD-current users) Subject: Re: Syscons CUT&PASTE functionality added...y Message-ID: <199606291335.PAA28476@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199606280803.KAA11731@ra.dkuug.dk> from "sos@FreeBSD.ORG" at "Jun 28, 96 10:03:22 am"
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As sos@FreeBSD.ORG wrote: > > (There are more nifty but not DEC-VT > > related features like the ability to control the VGA RAMDAC, which are > > IMHO incompatible with syscons' goals.) > > Yep, because now we are talking features that doesn't work on all > hardware and that is The Wrong Thing because: This works on all VGAs. Syscons doesn't work very well on other adapters at all (pcvt is somewhat better, but has also some weak points as well -- try using an MDA as console, and a VGA as X11 screen). > 1. There is no end to the supportproblem on this, and the percentage > of supported hardware is falling by the minute. I've never got any ``support call'' regarding the RAMDAC loading. :) Really, you should look into the code: it's in no way card-specific! > 2. The kernel size will explode if just a tiny fraction of the possible > video hardware is to be supported. Ah, i know what you're confusing this with: 132-column support. Anyway, this is also ``nice to have'', but it should actually be done as an LKM (with a generic [non-132 column] MDA/CGA/EGA/VGA driver in the kernel that can be overloaded by an LKM). There are other things i don't like in either console driver, like the hard-coded assumption about which number of scan lines is supported in the charactersets (for no good reason, it can be entirely calculated at run-time). I've done a bit in pcvt to make it more benign, so at least my notebook with its 480 scanlines total looks a bit better now. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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