From: Steven Schaefer (mathews20@donet.com)
Date: Fri 07 Jun 2002 - 23:19:27 IDT
I do have a question but let me lay out my thought process here so you can
correct me if my base knowledge is leading me in the wrong direction,
otherwise my question should be a valid one.
Well from my understanding of Unix/Linux/WindowsNT most everything is in the
protected area of User Mode. "user mode" applications are abstracted from
hardware access and represented by files in the /dev directory which acts as
a system call or that is further abstracted by a library in the user space
(ie fwrite() or some other C function). System calls and arguments have to
be tested or confirmed before moving them into the kernel space to prevent
corruption of some sort. Then the kernel or kernel module performs the
routine.
Now SVGAlib is a User Mode library, correct?
I saw some message here in the mail list someone was talking about accessing
/dev/fb0 directly in the code. Assuming he was calling system functions
directly (basically writing to the device whatever data stream format
/dev/fb0 expects).
Also reading in the FAQs it said SVGAlib supports the virtual terminals.
So my question is related to gaming... I would think that games would work
the fastest on a machine they had direct hard access rather than being in a
protected space... I understand that that would make the system prone to
lock ups. But how then does writing a game compare speed wise (assuming
same computer hardware) under Windows 9x to Linux ??? Is it enough to be
concerned, not that anything I'm going to write will really be affected by
lack of performance -- this is just discussion. Since Microsoft started
developing DirectX it seems like they were trying to make a programming
interface while in a sly way getting game developers used to being a
protected space. So even though Windows 9x operating systems could allow
direct hardware access are the commercial games nowadays even getting any
speed advantage over say developing on Linux? Yes, I know the there is more
support for windows game programming for visual and audio.. and more of a
user base of gamers on windows.
Since svgalib works in a virtual terminal is that put some kind of inherent
speed disadvantage for the library? Isn't the text mode virtual terminal
under linux limited to like 64 kbps or something like that? Does that have
a related restriction to svgalib in it's virtual console in any sort of way?
There are other forms of doing graphics and game programming such as X
Windows or GGI or some others but they seem even more abstract... so is
SVGAlib going to be the most low level functionality I'll find? While at
the same time have some decent support for a broad range of video cards
under Linux?
It seems to me that if I went on to role my own video display routines I'd
only be duplicating SVGAlib's efforts.
Thanks in advance.
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