Miod Vallat and Mike Blumenkrantz on BSD and Linux Graphics

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 15, 2026

• Mike Blumenkrantz: 2026 Status

  Not A Real Post

  Still digging myself out of a backlog (and remembering how to computer), so probably no real post this week. I do have some exciting news for the blog though.

  Now that various public announcements have been made, I can finally reveal the reason why I’ve been less active in Mesa of late is because I’ve been hard at work on Steam Frame. There’s a lot of very cool tech involved, and I’m planning to do some rundowns on the software-related projects I’ve been tackling.

  Temper your expectations: I won’t be discussing anything hardware-related, and there will likely be no mentions of any specific game performance/issues.

• Miod Vallat ☛ Where should portability stop?

  Given the availability of SPARCstation 4, it did not take long for Dave Miller to write a simple tcx driver for Linux, and for Paul Kranenburg to write a simple tcx driver for NetBSD, both in 1996. At that time, the NetBSD and OpenBSD kernels had not diverged much, and there was an irregular code synchronisation work performed by Jason Downs, who brought that driver into OpenBSD in 1997.

  And then, not much happened - you could use a glass console on these systems with the tcx frame buffers, and run X11, but they were handled as dumb frame buffers (i.e. a large memory area, with a programmable colormap.)