diff options
author | Knut Petersen <Knut_Petersen@t-online.de> | 2005-09-09 16:04:56 -0400 |
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committer | Linus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org> | 2005-09-09 16:58:02 -0400 |
commit | 9fa68eae9f8291a98bfe00b94b78f72eb253165a (patch) | |
tree | f3619e7302871a5d56264f6df4076c30857483ce /Documentation/fb/cyblafb/whycyblafb | |
parent | 6062bfa1644f401c08e78d5c8a161f7d11c5c830 (diff) |
[PATCH] framebuffer: new driver for cyberblade/i1 graphics core
This is a framebuffer driver for the Cyberblade/i1 graphics core.
Currently tridenfb claims to support the cyberblade/i1 graphics core. This
is of very limited truth. Even vesafb is faster and provides more working
modes and a much better quality of the video signal. There is a great
number of bugs in tridentfb ... but most often it is impossible to decide
if these bugs are real bugs or if fixing them for the cyberblade/i1 core
would break support for one of the other supported chips.
Tridentfb seems to be unmaintained,and documentation for most of the
supported chips is not available. So "fixing" cyberblade/i1 support inside
of tridentfb was not an option, it would have caused numerous
if(CYBERBLADEi1) else ... cases and would have rendered the code to be
almost unmaintainable.
A first version of this driver was published on 2005-07-31. A fix for a
bug reported by Jochen Hein was integrated as well as some changes
requested by Antonino A. Daplas.
A message has been added to tridentfb to inform current users of tridentfb
to switch to cyblafb if the cyberblade/i1 graphics core is detected.
This patch is one logical change, but because of the included documentation
it is bigger than 70kb. Therefore it is not sent to lkml and
linux-fbdev-devel,
Signed-off-by: Knut Petersen <Knut_Petersen@t-online.de>
Cc: Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix@mulix.org>
Acked-by: Antonino Daplas <adaplas@pol.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/fb/cyblafb/whycyblafb')
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/fb/cyblafb/whycyblafb | 85 |
1 files changed, 85 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/fb/cyblafb/whycyblafb b/Documentation/fb/cyblafb/whycyblafb new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..a123bc11e698 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/fb/cyblafb/whycyblafb | |||
@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ | |||
1 | I tried the following framebuffer drivers: | ||
2 | |||
3 | - TRIDENTFB is full of bugs. Acceleration is broken for Blade3D | ||
4 | graphics cores like the cyberblade/i1. It claims to support a great | ||
5 | number of devices, but documentation for most of these devices is | ||
6 | unfortunately not available. There is _no_ reason to use tridentfb | ||
7 | for cyberblade/i1 + CRT users. VESAFB is faster, and the one | ||
8 | advantage, mode switching, is broken in tridentfb. | ||
9 | |||
10 | - VESAFB is used by many distributions as a standard. Vesafb does | ||
11 | not support mode switching. VESAFB is a bit faster than the working | ||
12 | configurations of TRIDENTFB, but it is still too slow, even if you | ||
13 | use ypan. | ||
14 | |||
15 | - EPIAFB (you'll find it on sourceforge) supports the Cyberblade/i1 | ||
16 | graphics core, but it still has serious bugs and developement seems | ||
17 | to have stopped. This is the one driver with TV-out support. If you | ||
18 | do need this feature, try epiafb. | ||
19 | |||
20 | None of these drivers was a real option for me. | ||
21 | |||
22 | I believe that is unreasonable to change code that announces to support 20 | ||
23 | devices if I only have more or less sufficient documentation for exactly one | ||
24 | of these. The risk of breaking device foo while fixing device bar is too high. | ||
25 | |||
26 | So I decided to start CyBlaFB as a stripped down tridentfb. | ||
27 | |||
28 | All code specific to other Trident chips has been removed. After that there | ||
29 | were a lot of cosmetic changes to increase the readability of the code. All | ||
30 | register names were changed to those mnemonics used in the datasheet. Function | ||
31 | and macro names were changed if they hindered easy understanding of the code. | ||
32 | |||
33 | After that I debugged the code and implemented some new features. I'll try to | ||
34 | give a little summary of the main changes: | ||
35 | |||
36 | - calculation of vertical and horizontal timings was fixed | ||
37 | |||
38 | - video signal quality has been improved dramatically | ||
39 | |||
40 | - acceleration: | ||
41 | |||
42 | - fillrect and copyarea were fixed and reenabled | ||
43 | |||
44 | - color expanding imageblit was newly implemented, color | ||
45 | imageblit (only used to draw the penguine) still uses the | ||
46 | generic code. | ||
47 | |||
48 | - init of the acceleration engine was improved and moved to a | ||
49 | place where it really works ... | ||
50 | |||
51 | - sync function has a timeout now and tries to reset and | ||
52 | reinit the accel engine if necessary | ||
53 | |||
54 | - fewer slow copyarea calls when doing ypan scrolling by using | ||
55 | undocumented bit d21 of screen start address stored in | ||
56 | CR2B[5]. BIOS does use it also, so this should be safe. | ||
57 | |||
58 | - cyblafb rejects any attempt to set modes that would cause vclk | ||
59 | values above reasonable 230 MHz. 32bit modes use a clock | ||
60 | multiplicator of 2, so fbset does show the correct values for | ||
61 | pixclock but not for vclk in this case. The fbset limit is 115 MHz | ||
62 | for 32 bpp modes. | ||
63 | |||
64 | - cyblafb rejects modes known to be broken or unimplemented (all | ||
65 | interlaced modes, all doublescan modes for now) | ||
66 | |||
67 | - cyblafb now works independant of the video mode in effect at startup | ||
68 | time (tridentfb does not init all needed registers to reasonable | ||
69 | values) | ||
70 | |||
71 | - switching between video modes does work reliably now | ||
72 | |||
73 | - the first video mode now is the one selected on startup using the | ||
74 | vga=???? mechanism or any of | ||
75 | - 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 | ||
76 | - 8, 16, 24 or 32 bpp | ||
77 | - refresh between 50 Hz and 85 Hz, 1 Hz steps (1280x1024-32 | ||
78 | is limited to 63Hz) | ||
79 | |||
80 | - pci retry and pci burst mode are settable (try to disable if you | ||
81 | experience latency problems) | ||
82 | |||
83 | - built as a module cyblafb might be unloaded and reloaded using | ||
84 | the vfb module and con2vt or might be used together with vesafb | ||
85 | |||