VGA Console Idea

From: Maciej Zenczykowski
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 12:21:02 EST


Hi all,

this is just an idea for a VGA text mode console improvement which would
provide us with 512 char fonts with little functionality loss.

Basically we perform a bit inversion of the font bitmap, and then map
foreground to background and background to foreground. If we turn off the
blink bit allowing high intensity background colours then we end up with
16 foreground colours, 8 background colours, no blink and no high
intensity background colours. Since both blink and bg high intensity are
seldom used (since you can (not quite) never be sure if you'll get one or
the other) we end up with a 16fg/8bg/512char font situation. Everything
works as expected except for direct memory access through vcs/vcsa, these
would need to be nibble swapped in the colour area, but then with 512 char
fonts these aren't exactly really supported anyway... What do you think?

Cheers,
MaZe.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/