Re: XFree86 4 on RiscPC

[Philip Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

>Surely fbdev is being very dense if it's doing that?
>1: Why would it need to turn on anything, as it's only talking to the kernel
>2: Surely it's not just an arm thing, as other hardware doesn't have ISA
>   [I'd guess Amigas don't, and I'd assume that fbdev should work on them]

I'm guessing it's not fbdev per se, but some more generic part of the server.

Fbdev does indeed work on amigas, but the difference is that m68k machines 
don't ever have ISA so it just gets left out at compile time (all that stuff 
is wrapped in some hairy ifdefs), whereas there are some ARM machines with ISA 
so theoretically you need to detect it at run time.  That said, I'm not 
totally sure that the direct port access is strictly necessary even on 
machines where it works.

p.