more windows on unixpc (screen memory)

[Bill Carpenter]

In article <484 at limbic.UUCP> gil at limbic.UUCP (Gil Kloepfer Jr.) writes:
> Yeah, it *will* eat more kernel memory...which I would like to have available
> for device drivers for other things .. like maybe the proposed SCSI board
> being worked on, voice power board, my own device drivers, etc.  Although
> it's THERE, it's not there to waste.
> 
> If the window driver is to use memory like it does, the parameter should
> be tunable, or it should allocate/free virtual memory at window create/delete

No doubt about it.  Bitmaps for windows could get up to about 30k
each.  That's not much in a regular old program, but it's enormous in
kernel country.

Sure makes you wish there were a user space window manager available,
doesn't it?  It would probably not be possible to completely emulate
the existing window system without dipping into a little kernel
sorcery, but you could probably come pretty close.  If you didn't care
much about compatibility with the native stuff, you could probably
just port some existing free window system.  Like, f'r'instance, "X"
(probably too hard to be practical) or "mgr" (I have the author's list
of things needed to change for SysV, but I don't have the time to try
it soon).

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   Bill Carpenter         att!ho5cad!wjc  or  attmail!bill