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Date:      Sun, 2 Mar 2014 16:11:11 -0800
From:      Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org>
To:        Justin Hibbits <jhibbits@freebsd.org>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@freebsd.org>
Cc:        "freebsd-arch@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: newcons fb driver
Message-ID:  <CAJ-Vmo=jCGUxXs_GBoCm581wTouozWE=AQ3x1wBKYM_J3_dGrg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20140302085511.6354f9ac@zhabar.gateway.2wire.net>
References:  <20140302085511.6354f9ac@zhabar.gateway.2wire.net>

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.. i'm pretty sure there was a reason for why it's done in byte sizes.
Maybe speak to phk?


-a

On 2 March 2014 08:55,  <jhibbits@freebsd.org> wrote:
> I've been looking into the slowness of the newcons framebuffer backend,
> and after discussing with Nathan Whitehorn, we've determined that the
> slowness is caused by single byte writes to the framebuffer, which are
> very much suboptimal.  His conclusion is that, on nVidia hardware, the
> card first performs a read, a very slow operation on the hardware, then
> a single-byte write, and I'm thinking the same.  So, to accomodate this
> limitation, I have a question and proposal:
>
> (q) From looking at the code, it appears to support, to some degree, a
> background image (the character blitting uses a mask, it doesn't just
> write background in that mask).  Is this truly the case?
>
> (p) If it is the case that it supports a background image, I'm thinking
> it would make sense to buffer the framebuffer, such that we write to
> the internal representation, and blit whole words or lines at a time
> to the hardware. With an 8-bit buffer, at 1920x1080 (common resolution)
> we would be using approximately 2MB for the buffer.  On memory
> constrained devices this can be quite significant, so it becomes a
> tradeoff.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> - Justin
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