BASHISH

I've found interesting terminal customization project - bashish.

One cent philosophy...

You can not earn all of the money - some of it you'll have to steal.

Translated from Russian.

vesafb-tng - be aware of too much RAM

I manage to use custom, home made, LFS-based distribution. Recently I've decided to adopt genpatches (Gentoo Linux kernel patches set) for the kernel. One of the new features was the new VESA framebuffer driver - vesafb-tng (the new generation).

My computer has 4GB of RAM, and I certainly have enabled support for more then 4GB memory (otherwise, kernel sees only 3500Mbytes). This implies two kernel options: CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G and CONFIG_PAE.

And here we go: LFS-6.1 + latest genpatches for 2.6.11. Everything compiles fine. LFS boots, and everything looks OK, but.. awk does not work - complains about internal error on any input. Well, my first thought was that this is its own fault - I've switched back to old awk (from 3.1.4 to 3.1.3), and the problem was solved.

Next in turn was gcc. It crashed with segmentation fault coupled with internal error and asked to report bug :). From this point the whole story became to sound very strange.

Moreover, I've discovered that if I boot to my old LFS-6, and then chroot to new LFS-6.1, then everything works fine, including new awk. But its not true vice versa. So I've come to conclusion that my new kernel configuration is the one to blame.

After a long serie of diffs, kernel compilations and reboots I've found the happy couple - PAE + vesafb-tng. So, unfortunately, I've said goodbye to vesa-tng.
Actually, there were no too much reasons for it:

• Ability to setup refresh rate
• 1600x1200 resolution - to make framebuffer linux console look pretty on LCD panel with 1600x1200 native resolution (vesafb can give you only up to 1280x1024)
  
• Desire to try out new things :)

After all, since I'm planning to move towards 64 bit soon, vesafb-tng would not be an option anyway, since it works only for x86 (at least it does not shows up in menuconfig on 64-bit system).

I've notified Spock about the problem, but I do not known whether he did something about it - he has never replied.

Update 26.01.2006:
Spock has replied after some time and provided patch for 2.6.14 that should have fixed the problem. I did not had time to check it. But now, latest patch against 2.6.15 works fine! Spock, thank you for great job on vesafb-tng and gensplash!