From: besp@ellis.uchicago.edu (anna besprozannaya) Subject: Support for multiple video cards (was Last Message to All) Date: 23 Jul 1992 01:57:06 GMT
In article <1992Jul18.183600.22257@athena.mit.edu> jnewbern@athena.mit.edu (Jeffrey L Newbern) writes:
>
>The reason that it is not trivial to add support for new video cards is
>that the cards are not hardware compatible. Typically, each manufacturer
>designs the card a little different, and often those differences are
>sufficient to make the hardaware incompatible. Normally, these
>differences don't show up, because the video BIOS corrects for the
>inconsistencies. For example, two VGA cards may use different chips, but
A while ago I was doing system administration on SCO system ;-{ and was
surprised by their innovative approach to handling different video cards.
The way I understood it, their video driver uses a runtime configuration
file, which tells it how to put a particular video card into video modes
the card is capable of runig. It looked somewhat like:
1024x768x8:
{ outport(0x123, 0x56); outport(0x789, 0xab); ... }
This file also described "capabilities" of the mode, much as /etc/termcap
does. I know very little about video cards / drivers.
Does it make sense and is it a good idea ? And does SCO _new__X11R4_ server
really runs that way ?