From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <41A6C491.2000805@sitetronics.com> Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 06:52:17 +0100 From: "Devon H. O'Dell" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 (Windows/20041103) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] VBE 1.2/2.0+ functions for Plan9 References: <6EFF6CA0-3F62-11D9-9629-000A9573A128@rogers.com> In-Reply-To: <6EFF6CA0-3F62-11D9-9629-000A9573A128@rogers.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0cf0e6a4-eace-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Bob Hartley wrote: > Oh well, I was hoping it would be something nice the way the new FreeBSD > allows loading Windows NIC drivers, except we have access to the sources > for X11. > > I will take a look at this in case some of the drivers are simply table > driven list of port numbers and data values to write. > > Thanks anyways, > > Rob Well, in any case, DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD have quite clean VESA implementations supporting versions 1.2 and above (and only what's in the spec, all drawing functions will have to be written from scratch). I'm in the process of getting a work environment set up, and I think that I can get at least the spec accomplished in a relatively short amount of time. WRT other drivers, the only ones that are really of interest would be the DRM drivers, these are included and actively developed in FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD. X11 drivers are pretty .... unpretty. I'll keep the list updated on my progress! --Devon > On Nov 25, 2004, at 10:08 PM, Russ Cox wrote: > >>> Please correct me if I am wrong on this: >>> Is it true that the XFree86 device driver modules are platform >>> portable, as long as they are for the same instruction set >>> architecture? For some rason I thought the Linux and BSD mobs could >>> swap video drivers around amoungst themselves. >> >> >> As long as you want to use them for X. >> >>> If so, would it be possible to create some sort of adapter code that >>> would wrap the x11 device drivers for Plan9 use? >> >> >> Possible? Yes. Particularly easy? Nowhere close. >> The X interface is much more complicated than the >> Plan 9 interface, and the interface is very different. >> In particular Plan 9 splits the job between user space >> and the kernel, while X goes through some hoops to >> do everything in user space. I doubt I would want to load >> X modules into the kernel, even if someone did do the >> huge amount of work to pull it off. >> >> I wonder if instead there is a way to pull the relevant >> information out of the code and generate a Plan 9 >> driver in its place. That would still be a lot of work, but >> the final pieces might be better for our use. >> >> Russ >> > > >