Re: my opinion about VGA devices
From: Tomas Carnecky
Date: Thu Oct 21 2004 - 23:54:14 EST
Richard B. Johnson wrote:
On ix86 machines, regardless of whatever code initialized the
hardware, if the screen-card is not put into graphics mode,
anybody can write characters and attributes at 0xb8000 directly
to the screen. Even user-mode code can mmap() that area and write
to it. So, the key seems to be to get out of graphics mode
before suspend, and go back later after resume.
Why do you let user-mode programs access the hardware directly?
You don't do this with network devices (there you have syscalls), you
don't do this with sound devices (alsa).
IMO it makes a proper power managment implementation impossible.
You can say that there are two different drivers for screen-cards in the
kernel. One is the VGA which enables the card during early boot time to
display the first text messages and the other is fb/DRI or even an
nvidia/ati kernel module which is enabled later on.
Last time I've tried a LiveCD distro I've seen a nice boot console with
background picture, high resolution (1024x768) and nice small font. That
means that the framebuffer driver had to be initialized at that time. I
don't have framebuffer drivers compiled into my kernel so I don't know
at which point these are initialized, but it must be at a quite early
point in the boot process.
When looking at the output of dmesg I can see that the first thing that
is initialized are the CPU's, ACPI, IRQ's and then the PCI bus is
scanned. Did anyones machine crash during these steps? I don't think a
healthy box will crash here. And at this point you can initialize your
graphics card driver like it is done in the LiveCD distro.
tom
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