text rendering

Generally, the wisdom is...

Generally, the wisdom when you say, "I need a foo" for some common value of foo is to not write your own, but instead use a preexisting one.

But we would like to offer some new wisdom. The first step, we believe, when you want an IP stack is to burn lwIP to the fucking ground.

Keyboard

Jacob and I had a mini-sprint this afternoon, and figured out some things about keyboards, magic numbers, i8042s, UNGET commands (which make life easier), keyboard performance, linking VNC into the keyboard routines, and grub crashes. Major progress has been made in almost all of those areas, except for the magic numbers area, in which more magic is there.

Tomorrow: differential updates for better user performance while running X, and text console framebuffer emulation. ... and P3 style files.

Tonight: sleep.

Code, as always, is in git.

Big changes

Big news recently. A week or so ago, Jacob got the VNC/RFB server talking to a client. Performance wasn't great, but we had output. Now, we've done two things that make a huge difference in terms of performance:

• The network driver no longer waits for packets to finish getting sent or received, and queues up packets as needed, like modern network drivers do. We actually use the full capabilities of the card's bus-master DMA interface, and boy howdy does it pay off; we actually get ping performance in the 'as expected' region, where all pings are handled essentially under 64msec.


• The big win, though, came from something very silly -- turning on the cache! You're supposed to keep SMRAM cacheless when you're outside of SMM, so that the user cannot get in your way and fill your cache with bogons (and hence have you crash in SMM). But if you want performance, you need to turn it on when you get in SMM. Finally, we can actually get the blazing fast speed that our 1GHz P3 promises. This brought us from about 3 minutes per frame to 15 seconds per frame; and the network driver performance improvements are incrementally helping that.

This is very exciting. VNCviewer now claims that we get good enough throughput to request hextile encoding (instead of ZRLE encoding) -- it thinks we're getting 4.5MByte/sec from the machine. Of course, we haven't implemented hextile (or ZRLE), but... It may be time to declare this performance fun to have come to an end, at least until we get mouse and keyboard support implemented.