Re: RFC: 1.97 roadmap

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/8/10 Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden>:
>>
>> What is the state of graphics on EFI?
> in efi/linux.c there is a stub with a mixture of UGA and direct
> access. I would prefer to switch to own drivers since EFI tries to
> "abstract" video. Bean has GOP patch but only few mobos support it.

I have found one such patch that AFAICT replaces UGA with GOP.

With GOP we get access to the framebuffer which is about as good or bad as VBE.

UGA is a different story. It only supports Blt (and FillRect), not
direct access, and the the Blt data probably has to be the same format
as the screen data.

This could be supported by creating an offscreen bitmap to which
video_fb would draw and which would be (partially) transferred using
the UGA Blt after every change. This would, however require some
callback which says what part was affected to be efficient.

Accelerated drivers might be also somewhat picky about the pixel
format (BGR vs RGB, 16bit vs 15bit) but these would typically have the
framebuffer mapped somewhere and could use video_fb for formats they
do not accelerate.

Thanks

Michal