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Subject: Re: atyfb in 2.5.51
From: "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>
To: James Simmons <jsimmons@infradead.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>,
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On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 22:18, James Simmons wrote:
> > AFAIK, the X "mach64" driver in XF 4.* doesn't care about UseFBDev.
> > Marc Aurele La France (maintainer of this driver) is basically allergic
> > to kernel fbdev support.
> 
> :-(

I've always stated that the whole fbdev model was flawed, it makes
basic assumptions about how a video card's memory and registers are
accessed (ie. the programming model) and many popular cards absolutely
do not fit into that model.

> I will have to go threw the X code to fix that :-(

There is nothing to fix.  You simply must restore the video state when
the last mmap() client goes away.  The __sparc__ code does exactly that.

I think relying on an application that mmap's a card to perfectly
restore the state would work in a perfect world, one we do not live
in.  Furthermore, fixing up the state like I am suggesting makes life
much simpler for people actually working on things like X servers and
other programs directly programming the ATI chip.

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