Chris G Demetriou wrote
> 
> [ sorry for the delay... this last thursday was one of the more major
>   US holidays, and things have been hectic all around... ]
> 
> > the title says it all. I had a good look around but can't detect any
> > advances on this subject. Has it been canned?
> 
> In a nutshell: there was a volunteer who indicated that he wanted to
> work on it, and he hasn't produced anything (at least, that i'm
> aware).

I am volunteering in testing his code once it gets on its way ;)

> As previously noted, I don't really have much time to be working on
> NetBSD/alpha at all (i spend much more time on it than i should), let
> alone PCI VGA X server support.  I've been trying to get some bogons
> out of the way (e.g. the fact that ISA VGA didn't previously work),
> and now i'm going to see about some sane interface by which the
> drivers can describe to user-land processes what they're letting the
> user-land processes map.
> 
> Apparently the XFree86 situation has improved somewhat, or at least
> the Alpha Linux XFree people are being more chattery about making sure
> things work right (under Linux) on the Alpha.  That indicates that
> it'd only take a finite amount of work to make it go with
> NetBSD/alpha, but i don't know how much work that'd be and don't have
> much time to find out.
>

As I said in my previous postings... I would help if I only knew what
needed to be done. I really didn't think that there was that much to
do since there is a X-server running on the RH-linux distribution.

> 
> > Whilest on the subject... scrolling text still is jerky. Which files
> > contain the code responsible for it? The screen jumps by about 9 lines
> > instead of scrolling line by line once it reaches the end of the
> > screen. This is independent from selected terminal type and shell.
> 
> Actually, it's 10 lines, and the source code responsible is the
> arch/alpha/wscons/wscons_emul.c, lines 122 - 133.  8-)
>

Ok, I have changed the condition of the if statements in 
line 116 and 178 from "#if 0" to "#if1". Bingo, the text now scrolls
line by line without noticable slowdown (using sun emulation).

vi and elm display the expected behaviour. There still seem to be a
small bug which will scramble the display under certain condition when
scrolling up quickly, but this is recoverable with ^L.

Would it not possible to use these if-statements as a switch using the
kernel detection of a AXPpci system or pcivga card?

> It's actually intentional, and I put it in because it's bloody slow to
> scroll the TGA line by line.  On a 24-line VGA, though i could see how
> it would be annoying.  Any suggestions for a 'not ugly' way to fix it?
> I guess i could make the number of lines to scroll a kernel option,
> though i'm loathe to do it...
> 
> FYI: The emulation code is also (at least) a little bit buggy, and
> doesn't even do a very good job of emulating the (simple!!) sun
> terminal that it claims to emulate.
>

The sun emulation seem to work resonably well. Yes it has some little
bugs but I am sure this can be ironed out eventually.

[...]


cheerio Berndt
-- 
Name	: Berndt Josef Wulf
E-Mail	: wulf@ping.net.au
Sysinfo	: DEC AXPpci33+, NetBSD-1.2