Hi, Andris
What is Your plans with linuxfb driver. It's very likely I'll need that to provide real time display of some measurement data (it would be best not to use X11 or svgalib in this case). It seems to be mostly working except of "amnesia" after switching virtual consoles
Well, I was very excited with the framebuffer driver, the video driver was very easy to write, the stock GRX framedrivers do all the hard work. Thanks for test it, it's the first "feed-back" I have about it.
Current problems I know, from www.gnu.de/software/GRX/problems.html:
- Try to change modes if the underlaying framebuffer driver allow it.
- Hide the text cursor.
- Working mouse (this is not trivial), GRX linux console mouse is handled by svgalib functions, but obviously this not work with the framebuffer driver, a new mouse driver is necesary, but Linux don't have a real mouse driver, and the user program must handle all the possible mouse types.
Now I have two more things:
- It doesn't work in my recently installed Mandrake 8.1, the device driver has changed from /dev/fb to /dev/fb0, but a simple change to the file to open doesn't work, I have to investigate it.
- Optionally make a framebuffer only GRX library.
Perhaps I could try to port virtual console switching code from Allegro-4.0.0 (allegro-4.0.0/src/linux/vtswitch.c), but not immediatelly now, now perhaps not earlier than in begin of next year. This is perhaps most annoying thing for me now.
This will be great! (but, can we apply the GRX license to the ported code?)
Absence of 8bpp mode there is currently not critical for me.
I think this is not difficult, but with my graphics card I can't switch the fb color resolution except at boot I time, so I didn't work on it.
Another thing is similar "amnesia" for X11 driver (verified now with 2.4.4p2): if I obscure GRX window, the contents is lost. I would write related code
I have a workarround for this, from www.gnu.de/software/GRX/problems.html again:
- The driver can't respond to PAINT events, so it has problems with XFree86 v4 because the backing-store is not enabled by default. The best solution is to have a context to save the actual window (and the GrPixel problem can be solved too). The workaround is to add next lines to the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file, in the Device section:
Option "BackingStore"
Option "SaveUnders"
, I would prefer to use gtk+ and gdk, build image in pixmap and blit it to screen as needed (tried to wrote some related custom widgets recently). Maybe it's worth to have such GTK+ driver (maybe it could be useable also for Windows, as there is Windows port of gtk+)
I don't know how to use GTK, are you speaking a GRX driver over GTK is possible?
M.Alvarez