On Sun, 2003-03-02 at 00:56, Jon Smirl wrote: > X has served us well for a long time but I just don't > think it is sufficient to be the standard video > platform for desktop Linux over the next ten years.
People were saying that ten years ago. They were wrong then, and I suspect they are wrong now. Too many people think X11 == XFree86. XFree86 is an *implementation* (arguably two with kdrive) of X11. > change in the kernel, but X hardly seems to change at > all. How can we speed things up? X changes, its just its very good at not breaking stuff and Xfree itself tends to be deeply conservative, perhaps overly so. XFree86 has been acquiring render extensions, rotation, resize on the fly, a sophisticated security model for partitioning untrusted applications, and much more, its just nobody noticed most of these except maybe the new font stuff. > I agree that X is very complicated to work on. Mozilla 2D XFree86 is *easy* to work with. It took me a day to learn how to write input drivers, it took me a couple of days to learn how the X driver model worked to rewrite the Cyrix driver to actually work. You can write a 2D Xserver in under a week. You might spend a while longer debugging it because all the hardware has crazy bugs. 2D XFree you copy a driver example, fill in your PCI idents and your mode switch code. Compile, debug and you have an unaccelerated X server. You plug in a set of standard Xaa routines one at a time and you get more and more acceleration. You copy the Xv example code fill in the blanks and you get video overlay support. Since XFree 4.0 you don't have to touch the core code, you don't have to duplicate a ton of stuff and you don't need to know zip about DDX, MI and the other core layers. Alan ------------------------------------------------------- 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
