On Fre, 2003-02-28 at 19:03, Jon Smirl wrote: > It is a fact that Microsoft Longhorn and the Mac GUI > are moving towards 3D hardware for their base GUI. It > is also a fact that it will take a lot of effort and > probably several years to move X in the same > direction. Personally I don't want to see Linux in the > position of having the new 3D effects in Windows and > the Mac and not being able to respond. I'm willing to > put some time and effort into this and maybe other are > too. > > I don't buy the "support old hardware" argument for > stopping the forward progress of DRI. With that > argument we'd still all be running in X86 real mode > and the Athlon-64 would be pointless. Backwards > compatibility is important and fallbacks should be > provided, but it's not a reason for stopping the use > of new hardware features. > > So what is the best design for achieving this? The > project has to have DRI at it's core since it's the > only choice for 3D acceleration on Linux. We also have > to preserve X Windows compatibility for all of the > existing apps. > > My first thought would be to get DRI running > standalone (like the fbdri project but sync'd to CVS) > then modify X to load on top of the standalone DRI. > After that works rework the 2D X driver to use the DRI > API instead of using the hardware directly. > > The reasoning behind a standalone DRI is to make it > easier to build a 3D windowing system. To create a 3D > windowing system a mechanism is needed to get existing > X windows into textures so that they can be > transformed. If it proves too hard to alter X, > standalone DRI would allow X to be replaced with > something like NanoX.
Have you looked at DirectFB (http://directfb.org/)? Integrating the DRI with that might be interesting, they already have an X server which maps X windows to DirectFB surfaces (mostly the same way as is done on Mac OS X). When I tried XDirectFB a while ago, it was amazingly snappy even without any hardware acceleration. -- Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)/ Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer XFree86 and DRI project member / CS student, Free Software enthusiast ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
