Linux Appliance Design

11.1. How Video Memory Works

From a programming point of view, the most important part of the graphics hardware is the video memory. Software creates graphical images by manipulating this video memory, and hardware interprets this memory to render images on the display. Before we can effectively display text or graphics, we need to understand how bytes in video memory are interpreted, and in what order they are mapped onto the display.

11.1.1. How Bytes in Video Memory are Interpreted

To understand the different ways in which hardware can interpret video memory, it's useful to remember that memory has historically been an expensive resource. Many of the earliest computers didn't display arbitrary graphics; instead, they interpreted each byte of ...