On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, OKUJI Yoshinori wrote:
> If your OS cannot make use of existing drivers written in C, you
> have to write many, many drivers as well as graphics drivers - IMO,
> that's a fault.
It depends on the reasons for writing the OS. For example, some
operating systems experiment with the idea of user-safe devices, which
require a completely different driver structure. Many experimental
systems have unusual interfaces to drivers, so Unix-style drivers have
to be extensively rewritten anyway.
The point I'm trying to make is that not everything is Unix-like;
operating systems research is producing some very unusual operating
systems at the moment.
The interesting thing about framebuffers is that they are some of the
trickier devices to initialise (there are so many of them), but once
they are set up they can mostly be used in a very simple way if that's
all you need.
> > Supporting a serial console should be possible, but is
> > complicated by GRUB's use of full-screen menus.
>
> If we can assume that the user will use an ANSI-compliant terminal,
> there's no problem.
That's a tricky assumption; I've seen all kinds of strange devices
used as consoles (including paper ttys). It might be a good idea to
add some code to GRUB to enable full-screen menus to be disabled
(perhaps allow items to be chosen by number instead?) and treat the
output as a simple tty; then serial console support could be added
very easily.
I'm afraid I'm not offering code at the moment; I am a shortage of
manpower, and I have a thesis to write...
Steve Early
