On Sun, Jul 07, 2002 at 05:00:20PM +0200, Balazs Javor wrote:
| I'm been reading through some howto's and came across the framebuffer one.
| It mentions that using framebuffer drivers are a Goof Thing, but
| it does not really go into details on why. (Except for the Tux logo
| at startup :)
|
| So is there a real advantage on switching to these devices on an
| allready working systam?
The Tux logo is cool, but how often do I see it? (check my headers
for an estimate)
I use vesafb on the two machines I control because :
·) nice large console
·) X configuration consists of Driver "fbdev" and X Just Works.
No more messing around with modelines or whatever.
·) The _ability_ to specify different fonts (if I bothered to),
and more importantly the ability to handle Unicode and
non-ASCII characters.
·) The ability to do graphics without X.
VGA doesn't provide those capabilities, and X's usual configuration
is usually a pain, unless you have an working copy of the config file
you can reinstate.
I noticed an interesting comment in the archive Baloo reference :
When X11 locks up, I can still kill it and my box lives. When
framebuffers crash, their is no recovery save rebooting.
I see two problems with this. First, if X locks up nicely, it _can_
hose your video hardware to the point of requiring a reboot. Killing
it may leave your video hardware in some odd state that is unusable.
Secondly, the need to reboot when a serious problem in the kernel
bites you is true for _anything_ that is in the kernel. The solution
to that is the Hurd -- a microkernel with everything else in userland.
I don't see how that makes VGA any better than framebuffer.
One downside to using certain framebuffers is performance. With
vesafb, the video performance is not good at all. It isn't hard to
live with it, though, for everything except gaming and playing movies.
(neither of which I find time to do)
-D
--
A)bort, R)etry, B)ang it with a large hammer
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/
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