On Tuesday, May 11, 1999 12:56 PM, Alistair Riddoch [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> Eric J. Korpela writes:
> >
> >
> > > o MSDOS driver support. I wrote a 640x480x16 color driver in about 45 minutes.
> > >NanoX now runs on DOS! (OK, I did this only to see how portable nanoX
> > >is, and the
> > >mouse driver still isn't written) This still uses MSC graphics library.
> > >I'll have the bios
> > >int10 version driver done shortly, which will allow nanoX to run on
> > >ELKS! We should
> > >have an ELKS version shortly... BTW, the nanoX kernel is around 20k on DOS...
> >
> > Does anyone else agree with me that direct int 10 access is a mistake?
> > Wouldn't access through a device driver be a bit more unixy? It would
> > be able to prevent multiple processes from trying to access int 10 services.
> >
>
> We could add another ioctl to the dircon driver that calls int 10 for us.
> This would add minimal code to the kernel (no extra driver), and providing
> everything can be done thorugh int 10 it would keep the user space code
> hardware clean.
I think that's a good idea to potentially solve the lock problem,
but of course lock code would have to be executed. At this point, it's going
to be *way* too slow for all the graphics primitives to go thru a kernel mode
transition, however. With graphics, we want speed... Even on older systems!
Overall, I don't think its a good idea to bring graphics stuff into the ELKS kernel,
yet.
Especially since the plan is there'll be only one graphics server running per
ELKS system, ever.
>
> What do you think Greg?
>
> Al
>
