Low-level Graphics on Raspberry Pi (part X update III)

Finally managed to find the cause for the (intermittent - reproducible at will only straight after boot) screen blanking issue (mentioned in previous post): the changes in the framebuffer driver seem to require the calls to KDSETMODE to be inside the FBIOPUT_VSCREENINFO calls... Fixed code now in GitHub

Low-level Graphics on Raspberry Pi (part X update II)

Finally... in continuation to this post, after some elaboration on the forum I managed to get down to testing this properly - it appears that the changes in the fb driver can be made to work! Replace the 'switch page' by either (ioctl version):

        // switch page
        // ioctl version
        vinfo.yoffset = cur_page * vinfo.yres;
        ioctl(fbfd, FBIOPAN_DISPLAY, &vinfo);
        ioctl(fbfd, FBIO_WAITFORVSYNC, 0);

or (mailbox version):

        // switch page
        // mailbox version
        vx = 0;
        vy = cur_page * vinfo.yres;
        set_fb_voffs(&vx, &vy);
        ioctl(fbfd, FBIO_WAITFORVSYNC, 0);

Curiously the order has to be pan first - wait for vsync after... Obviously if going for the 'ioctl only version' one can scrap all the extra code and there is no need to create the char_dev node etc.

Cleaned up 'pure Linux fb' version of the code available in GitHub. Compile with (as I took out the timing code no need for the rt lib):

gcc -O2 -o fbtestXIV fbtestXIV.c

And run with:

fbset -depth 8
./fbtestXIV

...as it appears the latest Raspbian builds require forcing the framebuffer mode to 8-bit colors before running the examples where 8-bit mode is set. Later the mode can be freely set and the examples run fine... If you want to time the execution use:

time ./fbtestXIV

...which should give just over 10 s if we managed to produce 60 fps for 10 seconds.