New VESA Driver for QNX 6

Submitted by newsagent on

Evan Hillas released a new VESA graphics driver for QNX 6, tweaked for speed. It is downloadable from here. After you download and unpack it, you should find the devg-vesabios.so which you need to place in your "/lib/dll" directory. Be sure it is marked executable.
evanh wrote The QNX 6.x Photon VESA driver is known for it's sluggish performance and fixed 60 Hz refresh rate. This experimental version has two improvements, a virtual frame buffer and settable refresh rate.

The virtual frame buffer (shadow buffer) is the same method that the SVGA (vbe 1.x) driver uses. This has proven to be a faster solution for desktop use on Photon. Feedback is welcome, I may try adding a switch for turning it off.

The settable refresh rate is a big relief for those sitting in front of a 60 Hz CRT display all day long. This still needs improving as the prefs don't know about it so you have to manually edit the command in "Advanced" and add, for example, -R85 for a 85 Hz display.

There is a restriction on the use of the refresh rate option, your graphics card must support VBE 3.0 or greater. I have only seen Nvidia cards with the newer VBE version so it is possible this feature, for the time being, is limited the Nvidia cards.

To use this vesa driver with VMWare, first install QNX 6 under VMWare following this document, then download and install this vesa driver. Finally, disable the /sbin/enum-pnpisa by renaming it (mv /sbin/enum-pnpisa /sbin/enum-pnpisa.backup). Now reboot the virtual machine and you will be able to choose to use vesa mode. One side effect of disabling enum-pnpisa is the network driver won't be auto started, you can start it manually by running
io-net -dpcnet -ptcpip &
then the network config GUI should be able to see the network interface. You can then use the GUI to assign the IP address. If you are command line person, you can use ifconfig to assign the IP or run "dhcp.client" if you are a dhcp client.