From: Andrew Apted <ajapted@netspace.net.au>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 22:41:58 +1000

Re: kgicon, etc

Alexander Larsson writes:

>   Ok, i did a new try in my ongoing quest to have a working kgicon. Using 
>  2.1.113 with vgacon+vesafb configured first and then vgafb+vesafb i managed to 
>  get a black screen and complete hangup when insmod'ing kgicon.o 
>  (monosync(svga)+mystique).
>  
>  Any takers?

Sorry, no idea, but I've just committed some fixes (mmio etc), so you
might want to try again.

>  Also can someone explain to me nice and easily what VGACON and VGAFB are and 
>  what their differences are.

Vgacon is an "pure console" driver which drives the VGA hardware directly.
Vgafb is a framebuffer driver, which gets driven by the "fbcon" console
driver as if it were a graphics driver.

> And also why kgicon needs VGAFB and why VGAFB is 

Fbcon provides a mechanism for transferring VTs from one framebuffer to
another (FBIOPUT_CON2FBMAP), and since VGAFB is a framebuffer (and so is
kgicon), this is what we need.  We can't do that yet with vgacon.

>  called decapricated and to be removed 'soon' on linux-kernel.

Because it is too confusing having both vgacon & vgafb, and vgacon has
all the features now (able to be resized, font setting, ...).

Cheers,
_____________________________________________  ____
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  Andrew Apted   <andrew@ggi-project.org>       \/