On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 08:46:58AM +0100, Daniel Drake wrote: > Michal can provide you with clearer answers but here is what I know: > > fbsplash was submitted about a year ago. Some developers commented "do > it in userspace, you can do almost all of that there", and others gave > feedback on things which must be changed or fixed before it is to be > considered. I don't think Michal has had time to finish addressing those > points -- when are you going to get SuSE to hire him? :)
I'm sorry this reply is so terribly delayed, but I have been away at the time this message was sent. What Daniel said above is true. I didn't really have time to address or dispute all these issues (I'm not sure all of them were fixable). What's more, I don't think it is possible to get fbsplash merged at this point. Currently, the predominant vision for a themed console, with bell'n'whistles and stuff, is to do it completely in userspace (see the rather lengthy 'OpenGL-based framebuffer concepts' discussion [lkml, June 2006]). The idea is to do fbcon in userspace and keep only a very simple console driver in the kernel (for things such as printing oopses). Obviously, having the console completely in userspace makes it possible to do virtually anything with it -- the possibilities are by no means limited by just setting background images. I have to say I like this idea of a userspace console and plan to work on it after I'm finished with all the old stuff I'm stuck with right now. > I don't think fbsplash is too far away from possible kernel inclusion, > but vesafb-tng is. It is x86-only and is a big hack by design. Here's a > recent comment from Michal: > > >Wrt the future of vesafb-tng -- it's unlikely any code can be moved > >to vesafb. The way to go (and this seems to be both my own opinion > >and the opinion of the fb developers) is to have the vm86 code > >separated into an userspace application (which will also make it > >possible for the driver to work on non-x86, since x86emu can be used > >in place of vm86). I'm going to work on this during the summer, but I > >wouldn't want to set any deadlines or promise completion dates just > >yet :) The quote says it all :) Best regards. -- Michal Januszewski JID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Linux Developer http://people.gentoo.org/spock
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