Virtual Framebuffers

One really neat thing that we do at IBM is have weekly architecture calls often with guest speakers. This combines the LTC and Research together and is often a place where really cool things are discussed.

Jimi was able to arrange for Ricardo Baratto from the NCL at Columbia to give a presentation on THINC this week. I wasn't able to attend due to class but after reading a couple of the papers on it, I grew a new interest in a different approach to para-virtual framebuffers.

Apparently, the framebuffer interface in Linux is butt-simple and I was able to hack up a pretty quick vmalloc() based framebuffer. I'm currently plumbing it up within Xen and will hopefully have a demo soon.