From: mph@plasma.apana.org.au (Martin Peter Howell) Subject: Re: Multi Monitors??? Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1992 02:48:21 GMT
cummings@bbird8.Prime.COM (Kevin Cummings) writes:
>In article <1cl6jjINNfgg@venture.ksu.ksu.edu>, probreak@venture.ksu.ksu.edu (James Michael Chacon) writes:
>|> Ke-Wei Ma <km4c+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>|> It doesn't under the current configuration, but I guess it would be possible
>|> if your graphics card had enough memory. I have heard talk of wanting to
>|> run X in one vt, and then switch to another vt and be in text mode again.
>|> So, if this works someday, I guess you could tell X to start in another vt
>|> and to display on a specific video port.
>The S3 video chips are supposed to support this in hardware. It's possible
>to be using a graphics mode, and reserve the last bit of memory for
>a text window, allowing you to switch back and forth between them
>without any data loss (assuming that the programs using the graphics
>memory don't overwrite the memory being used by the text programs).
I don't think it's a question of the video card. All that has to happen
is for the kernel to save away the current graphics mode info and copy
the screen memory to some part of the process' address space where
X (or whatever) can happily go about updating it whilst something else
is displayed on the screen (which could easily be a text or graphics
mode). There would be no need to modify X and the only possible problem
would be slow switching to graphics consoles that had been swapped out.
-Martin.
mph@plasma.apana.org.au