On Thursday 03 May 2007 20:39:05 H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Kyle Moffett wrote: > > Actually I think the real problem was that "KD_GRAPHICS" got overloaded > > to mean "some userspace program is probably poking at the GPU in very > > direct ways possibly including /dev/mem". As such it really isn't safe > > at all for the kernel to write stuff to the screen in that situation; > > you could turn a panic()+reboot-after-30-secs into an unrecoverable hard > > PCI bus lockup. IIRC there were at least a couple chipsets which had > > that problem with X. If we can implement enough APIs for X to do all of > > its stuff from userspace without iopl() or /dev/mem then we could > > probably bring back the option for dumping oopses to screen in > > KD_GRAPHICS mode, but otherwise it'll just cause more headaches. > > It never meant anything *BUT* that, to the best of my knowledge. That > was certainly the original meaning of KD_GRAPHICS.
I started work last year on making the framebuffer layer use the DRM internals for all controls, providing a unified kernel and userspace system for accessing the graphics devices. It never got anywhere because I couldn't figure out a simple system for figuring out which driver (out of the numerous ones that could potentially be compiled into the kernel) to actually give control to. (I know I could have just looped over them all and figured it out that way, but that is far from elegant) I guess I could start on that work again - shouldn't take me all that long to recover the stuff I lost when a blackout caused my hard drive to get corrupted beyond recovery (and the automated journal replay didn't do a damned thing - I think it actually *added* to the corruption, but I don't think any filesystem would have survived that) DRH - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
