On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Dondalah wrote:
On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Dondalah wrote:
Would be nice to see the VGA driver use more memory.
There are lots of programs that use more than 800x600
screen size. Therefore we need a larger virtual screen
than what the VGA driver gives us with 4 bit depth.
We have lots of memory that isn't being used, both
on our video card and and in our motherboard RAM.
Even with 8 bit depth, we can use a larger virtual
screen than what the driver gives us.
On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 08:04:01 -0700 (MST),
Marc Aurele La France wrote:
The VGA standard, if it can be called that, simply
doesn't support this. You should instead use the
vesa driver (if your video BIOS supports it), or,
preferably, a driver more specific to your adapter.
FYI, my video card is a SiS 6215C with 8 MB of onboard
memory. Version 4.03.00.2118 SiS Corp. 1997.
xfree86 doesn't have a driver for this card, and the
generic sis driver doesn't initialize it. In the
past I used the SF86_SVGA driver, but that isn't
available in xfree86 any more.
The policy at SiS Corp. is not to talk to end users.
Therefore it is up to xfree86 to talk directly to
SiS on behalf of your end users. They have a
Linux FAQ on the SiS web site, but the 6215C card
is not mentioned in their FAQ. Since Microsoft
had drivers for the 6215C back in 1997, it should
be possible for the Linux community to get the
necessary information for those drivers 8 years
later.
I hope that gives you enough background to
understand my concerns for xfree86.
What are my options?
Vesa runs okay in 640x480, but there isn't any
virtual screen. Why doesn't the memory for
the virtual screen come from RAM? It seems
that the xfree86 drivers are basing their virtual
screen size on the video card memory and not on
the motherboard RAM.
As a user, I don't see how we are compromising
the VGA standard by asking for a large virtual
screen at any depth. xfree86 should have a "look
and feel" standard that goes across all drivers
and video cards. That would make the user community
very happy.
All video adapters these days implement extensions to the VGA standard,
incompatible with each other. The vga driver has no knowledge of how to deal
with the extensions, not is it intended to. That is the purview of more
vendor-specific drivers, such as the sis driver in your case. If you wish
to pursue this, you (or someone else with such an adapter) will need to
extend, or fix, the sis driver to support your adapter.
Marc.
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