John Carmack and Linux VT

Says John:

Our flight computer now has a display screen to show the current status to a pilot. My first inclination was just to mmap the framebuffer and pretend I was back in the days of DOS, but I decided to try and be a good linux programmer and use ncurses. It took me longer than I expected to get it working properly for displaying on the VGA for an application launched from a telnet session, and the performance was very bad. I wound up writing directly to the terminal device myself, spitting out all the escape sequences manually, but it was still quite appallingly slow. I have it working acceptably by only updating the various display items in a scanning fashion to avoid slowing it down on any individual frame, but I should have just followed my first thought and gone with a direct memory mapping.

I'm a little disturbed by the above, because I consider his application essentially equivalent to what Hercules does, and I never saw any performance issues with it. We all know that ncurses is a pig, and of course he should be using Slang instead of ncurses, but since he says that the result was slow even for the raw sequences, certainly this is not the issue. Weird.

It would be awesome if he posted his code somewhere.

UPDATE: John replies in comments:

The flight computer is only a 486-100, so it doesn't take much to bog it down, even with just text writes. I am doing straightforward fwrites and fprintfs to the console tty for everything.

It is at an acceptable rate now, so I probably won't make any other changes, but if RRL decides that they want anything fancy, like scrolling bar graphs, I will go straight to the framebuffer.