On Sat, 1 Mar 2003, 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. >We're not going to replace X overnight, but we need a >path to slowly evolve it. I am amazed at the rate of >change in the kernel, but X hardly seems to change at >all. How can we speed things up?
I believe it can be done by creating an X devlopment community/environment that is more conducive to future progress, and more open, accepting, and encouraging of new developers. The DRI project IMHO works pretty good in this aspect for ages now. >For me, a layered approach where each piece can be >compiled, used and tested independently would make X >much more manageable. Something like this: > >Kernel level - fusion of DRM and FB, libDRM >OpenGL - Mesa + DRI >Xserver >rest of X > >I'm sure people with more experience on X can divide >it in a better way, but the key is in dividing it into >smaller, more digestible chunks. These layers need to >build and run independently. I can't agree more. I think X should be broken into several pieces personally that are independant of each other. The drivers should be decoupled from the huge monolithic sources IMHO, and built separately against a DDK of some kind. Not unlike the existing XFree86 "sdk" that I don't believe anyone uses currently. I'm investigating this currently in my tinkerings. I'd like to split up X sources sometime in the future into at least: 1) fonts 2) docs 3) video drivers 4) various applications not needed at X server build/install time 5) X server and everything else That's just phase 1 idea. I think it oculd be broken down much finer than that. The benefits IMHO would be large. >The DRI tree has close to 10,000 files in it right now >and DRI isn't even a complete X tree. That's an awful >lot of code to read and understand as a single >package. Agreed. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat ------------------------------------------------------- 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
