Hi,

thanks for your explanations.  Some more questions, though :-)

On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 10:08:24AM +0100, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 09:57:49AM +0100, Gert Doering wrote:
> > How does "accellerated wscons" work?  I thought wscons just presents
> > a dumb frame buffer device to the X server?  Or can XFree86 figure out
> > "hey, behind this wscons, it's hiding an Mach64 chip, so let's use the
> > XFree86 hardware driver"?
> 
>  (a) wscons can use acceleration, if the kernel display driver provides
>      them. Michael made machfb do so.

How are these acceleration functions accessed?  Is it an ioctl() on the
/dev/ttyE* device?

Which "client" can/does make use of this acceleration?  XFree86/wscons, 
or "text mode console" output?

>  (b) XFree just accesses the card directly (and uses acceleration too).
>      The kernel driver only allows it to mmap the frame buffer *and*
>      the controll registers.

So you would use the "ati" driver in XFree, and not "wscons"?

(Some background: I've tried to run XFree with the ati driver some months
ago, and it complained that it couldn't access the card, but I still don't
understand the puzzle enough to figure out what *should* have happened).

gert
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