Re: Migrating ports from XFree86 to Xorg (Was: Changing default X11_TYPE from native to modular for some platforms)
Michael <macallan1888 <at> gmail.com>
2011-09-27 14:23:41 GMT
Hello,
> I don't see how we can use wsfb, though. The genfb driver does not support
> the graphics card's text mode, which we need for acceptable performance
> on such slow hardware. Or am I missing something? So we still have the
> problem to make new Xorg drivers.
You can switch to graphics on ioctl(WSDISPLAYIO_SMODE, WSDISPLAYIO_MAPPED) and back on
WSDISPLAYIO_EMUL. Some drivers use it to switch the hardware to 24bit for X while running the console in 8
bit. See cgfourteen, crmfb and ag10e for example.
Also, vcons has a few tricks to speed up dumb framebuffers ( seriously, is the blitter /that/ slow? ) - use
VCONS_DONT_READ ( see for example the genfb, cgfourteen and cgthree drivers ) which eliminates
framebuffer reads and instead just redraws whatever needs to be redrawn from the relevant text buffer
which gives a nice speedup on slow, dumb framebuffers.
If you run something VGA-ish in text mode you may also want to think about implementing blitter support -
Cirrus and S3 docs shouldn't be that hard to find.
You will want to implement at least an accelerated putchar() using whatever colour expansion scheme your
hardware supports so you don't have to map the framebuffer at all ( and VCONS_DONT_READ with an
accelerated putchar() may scroll faster than the blitter on some old hardware )
I don't know what caching modes the various 68k CPUs support, many more modern ones support something
that's still uncached but allows for write combining, prefetching, relaxed ordering or any combination
thereof, which is useful for accessing device memory ( like framebuffers ). This can be enabled using the
BUS_SPACE_MAP_PREFETCHABLE flag in bus_space_(m)map() if your underlying pmap supports it. I added
support for this on PowerPC ( don't set the G bit for relaxed ordering, buffering etc. ), ARM ( allow write
buffering ), MIPS ( use the 'accelerated' CCA if the CPU supports it ) - if your CPUs have anything like this
you may want to support it, any little speedup helps and on slow hardware with dumb framebuffers it's often
quite noticeable. Even if you have hardware acceleration the Xse
rver will want to access video memory at some point.
have fun
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