Around 10 o'clock on Jan 13, Egbert Eich wrote:

> To make RandR rotation work one needs layer support. I have a 
> sample implementaion (it takes two lines per driver) however
> this is too experimental to bee added to 4.3 I'm afraid.

I have done a more complete investigation in September and decided that the 
changes needed were significantly more extensive than could be reasonably 
accomplished in the timeframe available.

As resize presents the largest application visible effect from the 
extension, and also significant value for existing users, I thought 
providing just resize was of enough benefit that it should be included 
even if the rotate portion wasn't possible in the current timeframe.

Another factor in my thoughts was the work Mark is doing related to 5.0 
driver interfaces; early discussions lead me to believe that rotation in 
that environment would be significantly easier and more functional, so it 
seemed to me that making significant changes in the 4.x architecture to 
support a feature of marginal current utility made less sense than perhaps 
waiting for a different driver architecture which would make the task 
easier.

With the release of tablet PCs that essentially require rotation for their 
intended use, I may have to reevaluate this position.  I was hoping that 
the video chips in use for those devices would support hardware rotation 
as some PDA chipsets do, but it doesn't appear to the be case.  

The acer and toshiba tablets use the silicon motion chip which provides
accelerated rotated blts, but not actual rotated frame buffer support.  The
accelerated rotated blts are used to make a shadow frame buffer
implementation significantly faster, and I would want any XFree86 RandR
rotation support to take advantage of this.  But, I feel that it's far too 
late in the 4.3 release process to even consider work of this nature.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab


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