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Device drivers for XFree86
- To: cygwin-xfree@sourceware.cygnus.com
- Subject: Device drivers for XFree86
- From: "Suhaib M. Siddiqi" <ssiddiqi@inspirepharm.com>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 10:44:48 -0400
- Organization: Inspire Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
- Reply-To: ssiddiqi@ipass.net
We need a few device drivers to have XFree86 servers up and runing.
I need help and advice, both, on handeling this problem.
Below is a note from XFree86/Os-2 porting project. Which explains
how they handle the missing device drivers. Unfortunately, they do
not'provide source code of XF85SUP.SYS.
Any ideas? Or, any one willing to help?
Thanks
Suhaib
--------------
XF86SUP.SYS: This driver is a helper driver for the XFree86/OS2 project.
Note this is NOT XFree86/OS2 itself. This
driver offers some features which were missing in OS/2 before or were
available inefficiently only.
You can download the latest driver from here.
It is a multiple device driver containing the following sub-devices:
/dev/pmap$
gives you access to the physical memory of the PC. Warning: you
should never use this to access the
main RAM memory, as this could cause severe damage to the integrity
of data managed by the OS/2
system (I once managed to crash the system this way and this
corrupted the system so severely that I
needed to re-install), but only to access adapter memory (data
acquisition cards or aperture video
memory) which you know for sure that OS/2 does not know or manage
it itself. Required for Xservers
for instance.
/dev/fastio$
allows a fast method - the fastest possible - of getting access to
I/O ports. Required for XFree86/OS2
for instance.
/dev/tty[pq][0-f], /dev/pty[pq][0-f], /dev/ptms$
These are drivers that closely emulate 4.4BSD pseudo-TTY drivers
(PTYs); such drivers are required
to get xterm and xdm for XFree86/OS2 running. Also a future version
of Emacs for OS/2 will take
advantage of these devices.
/dev/console$
This emulates a Unix style /dev/console device. This understands
the TIOCCONS ioctl and other BSD
ioctls. Also the PTYs may grab the console (required for xterm -C
and xconsole).
A spinoff of the XFree86/OS2 project and my research on SES is the
following code:
A function in the recent version of the xf86sup.sys driver that
implements the "kill -9" feature of Unix
(Fixpack 17 required). Get the recent driver, API and sample code
(xf86sup.sys binaries only).
In Warp3, FP38, a kernel bug prevents this feature to work. This
is supposedly fixed in FP40. For
now, a workaround is to use the DOSCALL1.DLL from FP37 to get the
feature again.