Re: console font limits

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Thu May 03 2007 - 20:39:42 EST


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.

-hpa
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