Re: Rotated menu on EFI?

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/7/28 Robert Millan <address@hidden>:
> On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 10:03:50PM +0200, Michal Suchanek wrote:
>> 2009/7/25 Robert Millan <address@hidden>:
>> > On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 09:33:45PM +0200, Michal Suchanek wrote:
>> >> Hello
>> >>
>> >> Is there some chance that the grub menu could be drawn rotated on
>> >> graphical devices like the efi graphics interface?
>> >
>> > I'm not sure what you mean by rotation.  You mean that arrow keys
>> > navigate back to the top when pressing "down" in the bottom?
>> >
>>
>>
>> No, I mean that the arrow keys work normally but the menu is drawn
>> rotated to match the screen orientation.
>
> As Vladimir points out, this can eventually work on EFI too, but EFI is
> lagging behind when it comes to graphical support.  In any case, if we
> really want to support rotation it should be generic.
>
> Btw, were you thinking about rotation in multiples of PI/2, or arbitrary
> floats?  The former is not too hard, but the latter can be a PITA, I don't
> think it's worth it.

I am thinking about the rotation which is required to turn a landscape
monitor into a portrait one which is commonly used.

It is technically possible to arbitrarily rotate the picture but then
you would need support for arbitrary screen shapes (shapes other than
rectangles parallel with the axis) which is quite pointless for grub.

On second thought adding general rotation would be probably simpler
than changing gfxterm to do the rotation by itself. It gives much
better code separation and manageability.

The only problem is that there is a possibility to upload bitmaps into
the video subsystem and rotating these would need additional memory
because I know no way of rotating a non-square bitmap in place. Even
if the bitmaps were rotated only when they are actually used it still
requires additional memory.

Thanks

Michal