Driver development

Hello all,

I have a custom video board for a strongARM embedded platform. Its purpose is to decode MPEG video streams and display the video on a TV screen.
This board uses the Teralogic 751 chip for graphics blending and display. The TL751 is connected to an external SDRAM, for framebuffer and video storage. It has 4 overlay planes: two for video, one for graphics and one for a hw cursor.

I want to write a driver for some applications that require access to the graphics plane. These applications will write bitmaps to the framebuffer memory of the TL751. I want to avoid using custom interfaces, so I thought that it would be a good idea to implement a frame buffer device for that purpose.

While looking at the framebuffer API though, I found a some stuff that are not applicable for my case.
All that beam tracking and monitor synchronization fields for instance. The chip I am using does all that handling because the output is fixed to either PAL or NTSC. I want to be able to set these two modes, but I don't need all the details (timings, margins etc). Another issue is with the console stuff. I am not interested in having a framebuffer console. All I want is to give apps an API to the framebuffer memory. I see a lot of work has been done towards the direction of splitting the fb device stuff and the fb console stuff, but can I write a fb driver with no reference to fbcon?

Is it possible to implement such a framebuffer driver?
I want to look at some code to understand how the API works. From the drivers included in the kernel tree (drivers/video), which are closest to what I am trying to do?

thanks in advance,

Manousaridis Angelos

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