Subject: Re: wscons support for various framebuffers (questions from NetBSD sparc newbie)
To: None <port-sparc@netbsd.org>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: port-sparc
Date: 02/28/2007 18:13:31
>> If not, it'll feel awfully slow. (That's the major feature of my
>> xcg14, to my mind: 8bpp and 24bpp on the same screen. 24bpp without
>> acceleration is pretty sluggish-feeling, even with an SS20 driving
>> it, so I wanted to use it only when necessary.)
> Hmm, doesn't the cg14 have at least some sort of blitter-like
> thingie?
I've seen that claimed, but I have seen no documentation whatsoever on
it; a blitter I don't know how to use is approximately as useful as no
blitter at all. (Worse, actually; I've seen it claimed that the
blitter is capable of blits between areas of system RAM, as well as
framebuffer RAM, meaning access to it needs to be sequestered behind a
syscall for proper security - and doing a syscall per blit strikes me
as a good way to wreck performance, though admittedly I have no
measured data to back that guess up.)
> I suspect the latter since the suncg6 driver was unaccelerated too,
> until I added the missing bits. And for its age the cg6's blitter is
> far from slow.
I know - the usability improvement for text consoles when I added
blitter support to the text console code was...large. (Text console on
the cg16 is pretty painful too. I don't use it for more than the
occasional sysadminly things.)
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