Subject: Re: New snapshot of ATI Mach64 framebuffer driver
To: None <junyoung@mogua.com, tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: None <eeh@netbsd.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/13/2002 20:43:46
| As you might know, I have been working on Mach64 framebuffer driver
| recently. As of today, the `mach' driver started to do a real job.
| Now the driver attaches to rasops and wsdisplay successfully, and
| you can have 144x54 console in 1152x864 resolution (up to 1280x1024)
| on your screen. Although there are lots of bugs and unimplemented
| features, it seems to work quite well on my machine (i386 and Rage
| IIC AGP). 

There are definite endianness problems on sparc64.  The characters 
are garbled and in a funny violet color.

Rasops probably needs fixing.  Right now it tries to determine what
endianness to use for stamps by checking `#if BYTE_ORDER == BIG_ENDIAN'
which is not true for PCI devices.  If I pretend the machine is 
little-endian then the font is legible but remains in a funny color.  
So this probably needs to be configured dynamically or bus_space-ified.

The second issue is that the screen is cleared when wscons attaches.
I don't know if you're doing this or the wscons code itself.  I expect
it's the latter.  We really should query the firmware and use the current
settings for font, width, height, and cursor position if any they way 
the SBus frame buffer drivers do.  With those you can't tell visually
when you stop using firmware I/O and switch to rasops for I/O.

Eduardo