Re: [9fans] ati radeon support

[C H Forsyth <forsyth@vitanuova.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 762 bytes --]

yes, the problem with graphics cards is really the strange card-specific stuff
needed to put it into a reasonable large, deep linear colour mode.
if we had only to write code for the hw cursor for each one,
that would be much less of a problem.  even some of the hardware
drawing code doesn't look hard to exploit ... once the card is in a sensible mode.

the cursor code always seemed fairly similar, so it might not be too hard
to have a table of ids just for that if necessary, and certainly card-specific
code for that is fairly easy to write.  one of the changes i
was making to the software cursor in inferno is to bring it
into a common interface with the hardware one
(allowing for the need to interact a bit with devdraw re. screen access).

[-- Attachment #2: Type: message/rfc822, Size: 2621 bytes --]

From: jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] ati radeon support
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 10:34:29 -0400
Message-ID: <3308f46c395bce82502b731fc273af8b@plan9.bell-labs.com>

On Fri Oct  3 09:10:45 EDT 2003, rog@vitanuova.com wrote:
> > On last discussion I understood that there is a problem with hw cursor
> > (noone supports it even if the standard VESA does). Before using VESA,
> > someone has to write support for software cursor.
>
> you're right: the inferno stuff that forsyth posted relied on software
> cursor support, something that plan 9 no longer has, i believe.

I haven't ever looked at VESA, so forgive me if this is a stupid question:
once you have used VESA to set up the hardware, if you know how to drive the
hardware cursor is there anything stopping you from doing that? Usually,
writing the code for a hardware cursor is fiddly but not hard.