Re: kdrive porting question

Around 13 o'clock on Mar 28, Brent Cook wrote:

> Looking at how other drivers get screen information, some such as the ati
> and mga drivers get info using vesa or fbdev, but the i810 driver seems to
> get screen information itself. What should I do? 

It depends.  If you have all of the mode selection logic available, you 
can write a 'bare metal' driver like the savage or i810 ones, that entails 
quite a bit of work to get the registers programmed correctly, but you end 
up with a much more flexible and powerful server.  The alternative is to 
lean heavily on the BIOS on the video card for mode setup, either through 
the kernel fbdev driver or the vm86-based VBE code in the vesa directory.
Most of the sample code takes the latter approach as it's a whole lot less 
work, and ends up working on weird laptops much more reliably (at least 
for older laptops).

> Also, can I put the work-in-progress driver into CVS, or should I wait
> until it is functional before submitting? I hate to clutter the CVS
> changelogs, but it would be nice to have some version control.

If it's new code, feel free to use fd.o CVS for revision control.  Just 
don't build it by default and it won't bother anyone.

-keith

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