UMMMM....., I think that you are missing something here......
What I am talking about is _assembler_level_ high-efficiency no-bullshit
abstraction, based primarily on the following premise:
-- a video card is really only a very small, very dumb, embedded
microcomputer with shared-accessible memory & a communications API (not all
that much different from any other OSI model......including TCP, UDP or IP).
If one looks at a video card like this, then they quickly free themselves
from the error of looking at it as just a dumb slave device--because they
really are quite the opposite in more modern computers. In any case, what I
am talking about in the first half of my previous post, is abstracting the
video to the point at which we just deal with the framebuffer data itself &
painting that data to the screen to get higher-res stuff started. One often
forgets in these days that you can still quickly & efficiently paint a raw
2D screen with little effort or overhead & just let the existing hardware
deal with the finished frame data itself (not all that much different really
from what Kevin wants to do & what Colin is trying to do.......).
I still am a firm believer that if we try to create too good of a video-card
abstraction that we will be shooting ourselves in the feet with a Howitzer.
Things like MIP-mapping are extremely costly in processor time (and are
beyond what we can do for now by far)--in fact even polygon-based processing
is beyond our abilities. These are the reasons why video cards these days
have big HUGE 200 MIPS chips on them!!!! Let us not forget that for now our
virtualization itself doesn't even crank 50 MIPS (& it takes long enough for
video to update as it is)!!!
Drew Northup, N1XIM
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf
> Of Ramon van Handel
> Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 4:37 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [plex86] One really whacked-out video idea......
>
>
> >While I was away from school at my grandmother's I got this really weird
> >idea for some video stuff in plex86 (running on a LINUX
> host.....). What if
> >we were to do what XFree86 fbdev support does, and just write
> the guest to
> >/dev/fb0 (with some simple tweaking....)?
>
> X has a similar feature called DGA (direct graphics access), which has the
> advantage that it works in all modes. Anyway, SDL works as a frontend to
> all of these..
>
> -- Ramon
>
>
>
