Dave Airlie wrote: > On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Connor Behan<[email protected]> wrote: > >> I have two video cards each hooked up to a different monitor. The AGP >> card driving my laptop screen is the boot display device which shows the >> console and I've configred xorg to use the PCI card driving my external >> monitor when I start it. I can use Ctrl+Alt+Fn to switch between X on >> the big screen and a ttyn on the small screen but whenever I do so, the >> inactive screen is not surprisingly blank. I'd like to be able to see X >> persist on my external monitor when a text console is in the foreground >> and eventually to see the output of a background tty on my laptop screen >> when tty7 is in the foreground. >> >> I know the second direction sounds harder... people have been asking >> questions about it since 2002 and the only solutions I've seen have been >> unstable kernel patches that are now dead. But I am naive enough to >> think that X could be configured to not blank the screen even when its >> own console is switched away from. After all, it's still running. Do you >> know of a way to do this? I've tried all combinations of tty and vt >> related arguments to X but haven't got it to work yet. >> >> One thing that I think might work, is initializing a framebuffer for >> both cards and then using con2fb to move a particular console to the >> other framebuffer before starting X. I can't try this however because >> all framebuffer drivers I've tried only create a framebuffer device for >> the primary AGP card. So do you know how to disable screen blanking when >> switching VTs or how to use multiple monitors with a framebuffer driver? >> Thanks alot. >> > > X at least with normal drivers can't do this, there is only one VT and > when X is switched > all the screens it controls go away, you can't do text mode and X at > the same time on multiiple cards > with the current system AFAIK. > > fbdev might be an option but again I'm not sure, you'd need to avoid > the VT switch in X, using > (sharevts or novtswitch type options). > > Dave. > Do you know what function makes all the screens go away when X is switched? I've tried to find out but this is probably way beyond my skill level. Is it in hw/xfree86/os-support/linux/lnx_init.c? Is one of the "restored permissions" in restoreVTPerms the fact that background consoles do not have permission to control screens? Or do the TRUE and FALSE return values in VTsw_noop.c and VTsw_usl.c somehow indicate that X should or shouldn't keep displaying on its screens? I can get VT-X1550PCI256 to display on my laptop screen while X is running. That's just the name of my card and when I switch Vts then switch back it goes away. But if X knows how to display that perhaps it could be made to display something else? Also a comment in lnx_init.c says "Detach from the controlling tty to avoid char loss"... by char loss does that mean loss of the characters that the textmode tty showed before X was started. And avoiding char loss means preventing that tty from going invisible?
I've also treid getting X to start in GNU screen so as to use screen keycodes to switch between multiplexed terminals instead of Ctrl+Alt+Fn to switch between ttys. Do you think this method is hopeless too? _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
