KMS and vgaconsole

KMS and vgaconsole

[Joshua Hudson]

Has anyone tried to implement KMS support for vgaconsole.

Not everybody wants fbcon (I most certainly do not.)

Also, having it essentially necessary for some environments
(co-existing with Xserver-xorg-radion) and unusable with others, such
as VESA in VM is not a very good situation.

This might get rid of lots of resistance to KMS.

Re: KMS and vgaconsole

[Jesse Barnes]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:41:41 -0800
Joshua Hudson <joshudson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone tried to implement KMS support for vgaconsole.
> 
> Not everybody wants fbcon (I most certainly do not.)

I don't know of anyone working on it.  It was always a distant TODO
when we were first doing the KMS work, and it's theoretically possible
to have VGA text & graphics modes available as part of KMS, but it
would require some big additions to the graphics drivers.  VGA modes
tend to take a lot more power than high res modes too, since they
activate power hungry legacy hardware that is otherwise disabled.

> Also, having it essentially necessary for some environments
> (co-existing with Xserver-xorg-radion) and unusable with others, such
> as VESA in VM is not a very good situation.

Why not?  Machines typically have supported devices or not; if so they
can use all the good stuff, if not, they can use the compatibility code
(like VESA) exclusively.

-- 
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center