One of my students has now mostly completed a documentation of the SunRay protocol after a lot of network snooping. He would now like to develop an XFree86 driver for it.
The SunRay1 thin client http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/sunray1/ is a disk and fan free thin client. Essentially a graphics, sound and Ethernet adapter with a relatively simple microprocessor and software connecting the three. It primarily receives rectangular bitmap update requests via a variant of SunRPC over the Ethernet/IP/UDP and forwards keystrokes and mouse movements and USB traffic to the server the same way. The protocol it implements is trivial compared to the X protocol (no fonts, no GCs, no security, only half a dozen graphics commands, etc.). Sun sells an X server that runs on a server machine and keeps there in memory the current frame content. Whenever the X server updates a screen region, the affected pixel rectangle is sent via UDP/RPC to the SunRay for display. All this is not too different from VNC, except that the SunRay protocol is somewhat more flexible in the graphical primitives used. What would be the best starting point to write a SunRay driver for XFree86? What interface is there and where is it documented? Does XFree86 split nicely into a hardware dependent and hardware independent layer and is that driver interface flexible enough to accomodate graphics cards whose frame buffer is behind an Ethernet? Any help and pointers would be appreciated. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/sunray/ Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__ _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
