Re: Native mode handling

Jon Smirl wrote:
> --- Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>>I think we should start thinking about moving away from fbdev in
>>the long run. Either that, or do some significant fixup of the
>>fbdev, which is, imho, looking more and more like a lost cause.
>>
> 
> 
> I am with Ben on this one. fbdev will probably continue to exisit but future
> X/DRM implementations may not coexist with it. I am strongly in favor of a model
> with a single device driver per graphics card and no driver driver timesharing
> between fbdev and DRM. There is no reason a new console system can't be built
> around DRM to replace the features of the fbdev one.
> 
> Ben also went down the path of trying to add full mode support to the radeon
> fbdev driver. He may want to comment on that. I'm doing the mode code in user
> space and the shared object for it is going to be at least a 100K in size. In
> Linux 2.7 user space is going to be enabled very early in the boot process, at
> that point you could switch from the BIOS console to a DRM based one with mode
> support.
> 
> Don't think of DRM as being 3D only. I would like to see DRM compatible drivers
> built for 2D cards too, they'll just return not-implemented for 3D features.

As I've said elsewhere, with MS Longhorn being the target for future card 
devlopment, do you really believe that cards are going to continue carting 
around blit engines?

In this scheme, the voodoo & voodoo-2 cards were more prophetic than they are 
given credit for...

Keith