From: Stephane Chauveau <Stephane.Chauveau@irisa.fr>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: 30 Mar 1999 14:27:40 +0200

KGI driver for banshee

Hello, I have started a KGI driver for my 3DFX banshee card . I have no experience
with VGA cards but the job progresses quickly (thanks to Daryll Strauss for
the XFree86 driver). Last nigth, I have seen the stars and the flying GGIs for
the first time on my console.

The current state v0.1:

 - card detection (pci info,memory,ioports,...) 
 - the clock ship is limited to 135Mhz  (banshee supports 270Mhz) 
 - text16 modes are not yet supported. 
 - graphic modes : 
      - 640x480x16 works fine (the only tested mode) 
      - 640x480x8: My monitor does not shutdown so the mode is 
        probably not so bad. Unfortunately, the screen is black
        (a stupid problem with the palette initialization)
      - small modes (<640x480) and large modes (>1024x768) 
        are probably buggy.  
      - modes from 640x480 to 1024x768 in 16/24/32 bpp have to 
        be tested. I hope that they will work quickly.
 - no acceleration
 - bugs,bugs,bugs,...

A first driver will be available in a few days. Unfortunately, I will leave my
job, my country and my email in a few weeks. It's not a good period to become
an official maintainer. A volunteer ?

A question now. Is there a method to remove the kgicon module knowing that I
did not write yet the code to save and to restore the initial text mode ?
moreover, 'rmmod' fails because the module is used 63 times (by the
consoles). I thought of using a second framebuffer (the vesafb for
example). But then, how to associate the 63 consoles to this framebuffer
before the 'rmmod kgicon' ?

--
Stéphane Chauveau