Re: Framebuffer devices as modules?

Sven Luther wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 10:06:53PM +0800, Antonino A. Daplas wrote:
>> Sven Luther wrote:
>>> On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 06:05:34AM +0800, Antonino A. Daplas wrote:
>>>> Florian Echtler wrote:
>>>>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>>>>> Hash: SHA1
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi, I was trying to have fbcon and nvidiafb as modules, however,
>>>>> the console stays plain VGA when I load both. fbset complains 
>>>>> about "no such device: /dev/fb0".. (the device itself exists, and
>>>>> works when everything is compiled into the kernel).
>>>> What kernel version are you using?
>>> BTW, would it be possible to use the new initramfs infrastructure, to move 
>>> the
>>> fbdev drivers out of the kernel and into their own initramfs thingy, and 
>>> still
>>> be able to start them as early as possible ?
>> I don't see why not. You can compile fbcon statically, and the drivers as 
>> modules.
>> Or both fbcon and drivers as modules.
> 
> Yeah, well, the constraint is that this is on powerpc, and there is no vgacon
> or whatever, and we still like to have debug output as soon as possible.
> 

The framebuffer can load as early as you can load initrd. So you'll basically
miss bugs before the filesystem gets loaded. The screen is buffered, so the
contents are there. So if you are fortunate enough to load the framebuffer system
even if the bug happened a bit earlier, you might still be able to see the
message.

Note that the framebuffer system loads a little bit late compared to 2.4. It gets
loaded after PCI, PARISC and rapidio.

Tony


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