From: David Waite <mass@ufl.edu>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 20:24:13 -0400

RE: FW: Cyrix MediaGX fbcon work

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon M. Taylor [mailto:taylorj@ecs.csus.edu]
> Sent: Friday, July 24, 1998 7:06 PM

> On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, Emmanuel Marty wrote:
>
> > Jordan Mendelson wrote:
> > I guess we haven't advertised kgicon enough :)
>
> 	I have tried.  I have mentioned it many times on linux-kernel.
> When I see things like Alan Cox trying to pull the MediaGX
> driver out of
> KGI and make it into a standalone fbcon driver, I get rather
> depressed.

Would there be any way to get a mention of kgicon into the 'Configure.help'
for fbcon? I guess we would need to support a few more targets first
(besided x86)

> 	It is in the CVS tree, under degas/kgicon.  There is a
> bare-bones
> makefile which makes the symlink for the includes, and kgi/
> doesn't need
> to be symlinked into the linux/ tree anymore.  Also there is a new
> directory, degas/kgicon/util/, which contains the source to
> con2fbmap and
> Geert's latest fbset.  The main problem right now is that I
> missed some of
> the .configure hidden files when I was committing kgicon to
> CVS, so some
> stuff won't build.  All that is required to fix this is to copy the
> .configure files from Dali and commit them to CVS.
>

Is there no way to get this driver working with graphical VGA? I would like
to finish up the IBM52x Ramdac driver (so that I have grpahics support), but
I have no way to see how usable the kgicon stuff really is. If I can't
establish that things are working normally, then I'll drive myself insane
trying to get my stuff working.

If not, 'make vga' should be removed (I believe that is what it is called)

Also, is there any way that it could use files called configure.data or
something instead of the .configure?

> 	The default mode is still fixed at 640x400, but the bit depth is
> changeable with a #define and all bit depths should be
> handled properly by
> kgicon.  There are font rendering problems in 4bpp, due to endianness
> issues in the fbcon 4bpp text routines.  Alan Cox said he
> fixed this, but
> I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.  Ywrap is still disabled, so
> things are pretty slow.  I haven't done anything with
> acceleration, since
> the S3 accel code is nonfunctional right now.  Someone else
> will have to
> do that.
>

How could/should modes be changed? Is there a standard fbcon way for this?

I had several problems while trying to get the Ramdac driver I was working
on finished, and I got to the point where I had completely rewritten the
code about 4 or 5 times, had built upon someone elses code, and actually was
hearing that the driver was workign for other people; but not for me. I had
very freaky video output, and I never could figure it out. (It looked like
the data from the S3 chip was either going at double the speed or wasn't
latched correctly with the clock of the ramdac)I finally just decided it was
a S3 driver problem and stopped working on it. Well, then my computer got
hit by lightning and I went without Linux for 3 months =)

-David Waite