Why VESA and DPMS are available only for i386?

[Carlos A. M. dos Santos]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 2:53 PM, Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> wrote:
> Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote:
>  > Oliver Fromme wrote:
>  > > There's a third way, and I think this is the easiest one.
>  > > This is what the Linux VESA framebuffer driver does.
>  > > Let the boot loader (which executes in 32bit mode) switch
>  > > to the desired video mode, enable a linear frame buffer
>  > > (which is supported since VBE 2.0) and pass the address
>  > > of the frame buffer to the 64bit kernel.  Then the kernel
>  > > would not need to call any VESA functions at all, thus
>  > > eliminating all of the above problems.  The drawback is
>  > > that you can't change the console video mode anymore once
>  > > the kernel is booted, i.e. you have to reboot if you want
>  > > a different mode.
>  >
>  > This can also lead to a situation where the kernel can not restore the
>  > video controller to a known mode if the X server crashes or when the
>  > user attempts to switch from X to the "text mode" console.
>
> Why would you need to use VESA modes for syscons if you
> install and run Xorg anyway?

Sorry, I was not clear enough in my previous message. I'm not
proposing to use VESA modes for syscons. I was talking about a problem
I see in the Linux console.

On the other hand, suppose that I want to play games/digger. This
would require the ability to switch from text to graphics mode and
vice-versa even if I don't run the X server.

-- 
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/life
make clean