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Hello,

> To deal with this I propose the following:
> All platforms that use graphical consoles on more or less MI bus 
> systems are required to implement device_register(), intercept all 
> attachments of potential console output devices, determine if any of 
> them is going to be system console in whatever way is appropriate on 
> the resp. platform and add the following property to the device's 
> dictionary:
> 'is_console', type bool, can be true on up to one device.
> A driver is going to become console only when it finds 'is_console' 
> with the value 'true' in its dictionary.
> If the firmware or anything set up a usable graphics mode add the 
> following properties:
> 'width', 'height', 'linebytes' - width and height in pixels, line size 
> in bytes
> 'depth' - colour depth in bits
> 'address' - physical address of the framebuffer ( or rather, address 
> of the upper left pixel )
> we'll probably need more properties to support less than 8 bit, 
> amiga-like interleaved bitmaps etc. the properties mentioned above are 
> essentially what OpenFirmware gives us, usually in 8 bit.

Hmm, if we provide a property that maps wscons colour codes to whatever 
palette the firmware set up we could implement a truly MI generic 
framebuffer console driver - let's call it dumbfb - which would allow 
us to:
- - get rid of macppc's ofb and other MD dumb framebuffer drivers
- - support all firmware-supported framebuffers on sparc, sparc64, ofppc, 
probably prep and many more
- - finally switch sparc to wscons, just use dumbfb whenever there's no 
hw-specific driver ( some of those may need to be changed to return a 
score > 1 in their match() methods )
Maybe make it mandatory that hw-specific drivers for anything return 
something >1 and only generic catch-alls which handle a whole class of 
devices are allowed to return 1.
We'll probably have to copy something like OF's assigned-addresses or 
regs property to allow X to mmap() a graphics device's registers, 
apertures and so on. Without that we could still use wsfb.

have fun
Michael
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