[TUHS] Re: Origins of the frame buffer device

On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 01:51:10PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS wrote: The PC/intel 'birthplace' of Linux had the advantage that the video hardware always had an ASCII mode, so from that viewpoint there was no need for any fb interface initially to get things going. If I remember correctly, things like SCO Unix also did not use any fb-style interface for their X11. Correct. There was definitely a sense that keeping all the graphics bits out of the kernel and just letting Xfree open /dev/mem and do it's magic was the preferred way. Also meant that Xfree wasn't waiting on kernel bits and vice-versa and could keep going in parallel. Unlike today where there's only a few cards/manufacturers left, we had hundreds of similar-but-not-quite-the-same PC videocards on the market, so it was an understandable sentiment as change was fast and frequent on the Xfree end. The FBdev idea really started brewing because of the non-intel Linux ports that did not have the luxury of a built-in ASCII-capable 'console' so needed to get something going there (after initial porting with serial output). Something was needed 'in kernel' even for a plain console on the framebuffer and to keep it from falling apart some sort of general interface for some sort of generic X11 (even un-accelerated) as well. Most of the non-PC framebuffer hardware was too 'obscure' for Xfree to spend much time on as well.. The Linux/M68k port with Geert being very active here and really pushing to getting a more generalised display setup going that would work on the wildly different framebuffer hardware between all the m68k platforms but make basically use of 1 simple X server that didn't need to know that much about the hardware. Ultimately this led to the general FBdev project for all platforms. Bye, Arno.