From: Michael Gersten <michael@stb.info.com>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Thu, 19 Aug 99 00:16 PDT

Re: VC Switching

>I for one don't buy the "56M card" rational for killing VC switching
>while in graphics mode.  Most apps won't use nearly that much of
>the card's RAM.  In fact, a 56M card whose driver could protect
>it's memory area would allow us to stow away several VC's worth of
>fb data *in video RAM* simultaneously; perhaps even to allow drawing
>by several apps on their fb data whether or not their VC is focused.
>Maybe even eventually allowing card<->disk DMA transfer directly
>into the swap partition as needed -- who knows.
>
>...
>
>But, you have good arguments in favor of a sane vc-switching system.
>They seem to reinforce the point that the graphics card needs
>to be viewed as a resource server, serving up frames, sprites, 
>textures, and whatnot, and not seen as a single resource; except for 
>the actual focus (of which there is only one per monitor attached 
>to the card, so those are single resources.)

Alas, the card is not just a collection of frames, sprites, etc.

Andy pointed out that it is also a single set of registers,
whose programming is order specific, chip specific, and command-
non-atomic.

That kills making it a sharable resource as you suggest, unless
everyone is using the same graphics mode.

And then you have the X model.