From: Emmanuel Marty <core@suntech.fr>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Sat, 04 Jul 1998 08:44:44 +0000

Re: kgicon status update

Jon M. Taylor wrote:

>         Considerable progress was made today.  The bridge layer is now
> essentially complete - support for different bit depths is in and all
> relevant hardware info is retrieved appropriately from the KGI driver's
> kgi_display struct after modesets.  This means that, in theory, any KGI
> driver should now be able to be used with fbcon at all supported
> resolutions and color depths.

GREAT ! Impressive pace, Jon :)

>         No text-blitting yet, but that should be quite simple and easy to
> implement once everything else is solid.  It is needed, too -
> unaccelerated fbcon is very slow, especially at higher bit depths where
> you can actually see the characters appear one by one and it is easy to
> type ahead of the console and get garbage showing up.  At 32bpp with no
> ywrap enabled, Linux is close to unuseable.  This situation should improve
> dramatically with a bit of tweaking, though.

Well, if you like, I can do some x86 optimization on the bottleneck that the
rendering of text in graphics mode is ; I did that for the mediaGX driver, and

while it's not nirvana, it went from hardly-usable (the original C routine :)
to really-usable. Less good-looking, but works well :)

This for drivers that don't support blit acceleration, ie. half of them
including
mediaGX until Sengan Baring-Gould @ Cyrix daigns to send me his
undocumented blit code :) (well, the driver supports rectangle filling, but
not copy yet :)

>         I have been coding for almost twelve hours straight today and the
> screen is starting to swim.  Oooo, pretty colors...

I've been coding for about ten hours straight every workday this
week, but saw no colors. Can you tell me how to see them? :)

> so, formal validation
> with the VGA driver and lots of fbsets of various modes, working
> XF86_FBdev, working fbcon LibGGI target, etc. will have to wait until
> tomorrow.  So will a tarball.  Sorry for the teaser, but the end is almost
> in sight!

Oh *tap tap tap tap tap tap* We're not impatient.. *tap tap tap*..

>  By tomorrow evening, Sunday at the latest, I should have a
> fully functional tree with all the drivers converted over to the new
> layout and making properly, and I will release kgicon v1.0.

Ok :) I'll make sure my driver works properly with it ; actually Phil
Sydor of Cyrix is visiting us tuesday to see a mediaGX board
running under Linux (say, how many companies would try to
install linux to see how your driver works :), if I can show him it
works on a stock kernel, it will be nifty :)

--
Emmanuel