On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Bob Breuer <breu...@mc.net> wrote: > Blue Swirl wrote: >> but again: should we have a new machine with cg14 or >> some switch to select TCX vs. cg14? >> >> Maybe the recently proposed machine subtype patches could help here. >> > Well, let's try to figure out a method of selecting the framebuffer > type. I'll try to list some of the options, even if they might be > ridiculous. > > 1) Use the -vga option. I know TCX and cg14 are not vga, but I think > it's the closest existing command line option available. > > 2) Switch based on the -g WxH option. At the moment, the TCX emulation > doesn't really handle anything other than 1024x768, so switch to cg14 > for other resolutions if supported. > > 3) Use some other existing command line option, -device, -set or > -global? Might work, but the syntax may not be easy to remember.
We don't have an equivalent of -chardev, -netdev and -drive for displays. > 4) Machine subtype. > > 5) New command line option. Anything above might be better. > > 6) New machine type. Is it a big enough feature to demand it's own > machine type? Maybe, but see next option. > > 7) Select as default video for SS-20. The SS-10 and SS-600MP are > already very similar. This would allow for some differentiation between > the machines, but there could still be an option to switch back to TCX. > Note that TCX was really only available for the SS-4 and SS-5. > > > Is there anything else that I missed? Combined 7 & 6: make cg14 default for SS-20, add a deprecated compatibility machine for SS-20 with TCX. > > I'm going to go ahead with option 2 in the short term. I'm inclined to > narrow it down to options 1, 4, and 7. I know that 7 would have > backwards compatibility concerns. The cg14 seems to have at least the > same capabilities as TCX so there shouldn't be any loss of > functionality. Even though SS-20 is not the default machine, do you > know of any OS that works with the sun4m implementation today but > doesn't have a cg14 driver? Possible downside to cg14 for video is that > any "acceleration" is handled by the SX pixel processor which has no > available documentation. TCX also has some amount of unimplemented > acceleration. It would be nice to use some basic device with well defined acceleration or just a frame buffer as default.
