Re: [Qemu-devel] Graphic card

[Oliver Gerlich]

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Mike Swanson schrieb:
> 4. It sounds reasonable, but it undermines one of QEMU's goals:
> running guest operating system without modification (and drivers
> certainly count as one). Also, it'll possibly limit the number of
> operating systems you'd run in QEMU with fancy graphics...
> implementing Cirrus makes it possible to run many OSes with no (or
> few) video problems, including Windows 95, Win NT 4, almost every
> GNU/Linux, almost every BSD, Solaris, Darwin, Plan 9, QNX, DOS, BeOS,
> etc.
> 

I agree that it's good that Qemu emulates such a wide-spread graphics
card... But I also think it's some kind of dead end.
Not only does eg. BeOS not support that Cirrus card (last time I tried
BeOS inside Qemu, it complained that the Cirrus card is too old :-) .
Also I'm not sure whether the Cirrus card will ever be fast enough for
that. Do "real" Cirrus 5446 cards offer hardware video acceleration? And
do they offer 2d acceleration that can be used by DirectDraw? They
certainly don't have 3d support, so if Qemu should have fast 3d graphics
one day, it will certainly not work with the current graphics emulation.

So, I think we shouldn't dismiss the possibility of a special Qemu
graphics card (and driver). The Cirrus card (and -std-vga) should still
be available for those systems where the Qemu graphics driver is not
available, while the users who run a wide-spread, recent system as guest
can have faster graphics.

Just my two cents,
Oliver Gerlich
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