On 02/10/08 02:30 +0200, Peter Stuge wrote:
Jordan Crouse wrote:
As a comparison - Ron's screenshot:
.png - 97466 bytes .jpg - 46877 bytes .rle - 24846 bytes
What about .lzma? If it's going into the larball, we already have compression implemented, and it would be nice to have lossless graphics and less computation.
Maybe we can even blit? How does lzma perform on bitmaps?
Implementation wise - the LSS16 function I just wrote is about 40 lines of code with lots of whitespace.
My only problem with LSS16 is that it's clearly designed for, and thus limited to, a 16-color VGA mode. (The palette gives it away.)
For a 21st century firmware designed for 21st century hardware I would like to have 21st century graphics. Please?
Okay, everybody needs to calm down and take a step back here and look at what we are talking about. We are talking about an extensive graphics infrastructure to display a splash screen for firmware that can be up and into the kernel in less then a second. Coreinfo comes up so quickly on a Geode that it is visible when the monitor finishes syncing. Indeed, we are going to have to SLOW DOWN our payloads in order to display a splashscreen long enough for people to read it.
Ron is right, there is something soothing about a splash screen - it warms the hearts of our customers. But come on - PNG? PCX? 16 bit color depths? Is this really needed? I am not at all interested in making libpayload into a fully featured graphics engine - there are better libraries that can do that. All I was trying to do was something simple to benefit Ron, and since every distribution in the world uses isolinux + lss16, I figured that was a good shot.
Thats just my opinion - as always, patches are gladly accepted. Just remember who we are, what we are doing. Somebody at the Linux Plumbers Conference said, "Every time I see a splash screen, I wonder what they have to hide". Coreboot is the only loader on earth that doesn't actually have anything to hide. Lets try not to go overboard architecting a solution for one problem we don't have.
Jordan