On Wed, 2002-07-24 at 03:24, Micah Dowty wrote: > Hi Everybody, > > This would have to wait for shared memory bitmap support in pgserver, but besides a >port of SDL and a VNC viewer, it would be cool to have an emulator for the Linux >framebuffer. There are a two ways I thought of to do it: > > - Write a backend for some framebuffer library like DirectFB or SDL. This would >give the most flexibility, but limit the choice of apps to run on top of it. > > - Use a kernel module that provides pseudo-framebuffers, like the ptys currently >used for terminal emulators. It would allow pgserver to mmap the framebuffer, recieve >its ioctrls, and be notified when the framebuffer is written to
The Linux virtual framebuffer could probably be extended to do this without too much trouble. Add a couple of ioctl's to force it to allocate new fb's and change resolutions (I assume you're thinking maybe one app per framebuffer, right?) and you'd be set! A full realization of this could actually be to write an entirely new framebuffer driver for picogui that eliminated the copying from the virtual framebuffer to the new framebuffer by mmapping framebuffer devices directly onto the real framebuffer that picogui is using - one fb for each window. Picogui could control the window position and size (ie start address, line length, gap between lines) with ioctl's. Picogui's non overlapping windows become very useful in this regard. There would only have to be another ioctl to start/stop updates whenever you want to say -- draw a dialog box on top of it. Fall back to the virtual fb/copy driver when you're running a frontend that is not on a framebuffer device or not directly mmappable (ie the X frontend or whatnot.) Anyway, when i was fooling with some stuff a while back, I found this document which might prove highly useful: http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net/fbdev/HOWTO/ John ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Pgui-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pgui-devel
