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Date:      Tue, 18 Feb 1997 09:27:01 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby)
Cc:        ccsanady@nyx.pr.mcs.net, jdc@xinside.com, FreeBSD-hackers@freebsd.org, FreeBSD-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: pcvt/132 columns
Message-ID:  <199702181627.JAA11155@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <199702180500.VAA00752@lightside.com> from "Jake Hamby" at Feb 17, 97 09:00:50 pm

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> The worst part about the Sun, though, was that 
> there's actually an OpenBoot FORTH (in other words INTERPRETED) program in 
> the card's ROM which is used to draw the characters out to the screen, 
> leading to painfully slow speeds (slower than even a 9600 baud terminal on 
> the SPARC 2's) and tremendous CPU utilization, although it seems that NetBSD 
> and Solaris manage to speed up the console somehow, compared to SunOS 
> (NetBSD actually has a "RASTERCONSOLE" in the kernel, which probably has 
> something to do with it).

Look at the NetBSD console code.  They did it by preemptively scrolling
multiple lines at a time (4, I believe) when they hit LF at the end of
the screen.  The slowest part of the console code is the scrolling (easy
to understand why, without a bit-blit or memory page offset selector
to implement the scroll).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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