Re: SDL alsa support

["Blair Sadewitz" <blair.sadewitz%gmail.com@localhost>]

I have briefly played around with building directfb on NetBSD (version
~1.1 and a current git checkout).  It will build with some trivial
porting, except for the interesting part:  framebuffer support (it's
not too "direct" without it, heh).  They have a generic /dev/mem
backend (_very_ generic, IIRC one must specify various address ranges
for the video card manually), but nevertheless that should work.   The
main issue is  that their shared memory support will not build/work on
NetBSD.  Moreover, they implement their own proprietary IPC in a linux
kernel module.
Code could be written to use the semaphore facilities in librt (I
don't think that a kernel module is necessary to do what it wants, but
i haven't spent much time looking into it).  They already have some
userland code in the tree, though I don't know how well maintained it
is, as most people use the "fusion" kernel module.

Of course, another alternative is teaching it how to use wscons for
framebuffer access.  This *might* actually be worth the effort, as
there is a lightweight X server for directfb as well as some other
interesting applications.

I did not spend much time on this, as I am working on many other
projects, but if anyone is interesting in getting this to work on
NetBSD (especially those who have experience writing code  using POSIX
sempaphores, etc.), please contact me.

Regards,

--Blair