on my G4 iBook by more than half. Still 10% slower than syscons, but that's
much better than a factor of 2.
The slowness had to do with pathological write performance on 8-bit
framebuffers, which are almost universally used on Open Firmware systems.
Writing 1 byte at a time, potentially nonconsecutively, resulted in many
extra PCI write cycles. This patch, in the common case where it's writing
one or several characters in an 8x8 font, gangs the writes together into
a set of 32-bit writes. This is a port of r143830 to vt(4).
The EFI framebuffer is also extremely slow, probably for the same reason,
and the same patch will likely help there.
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