--- Philip Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So for the "X on top of OpenGL" afficionados... you > could get away with just writing a libX11 clone on > top of a direct OpenGL implementation like > Embedded Mesa or something. Skip the whole > server fiasco entirely. Mind you, you'd need to > cobble together some kind of window manager > behind the scenes. My old hack relied on a native > window manager to take care of that sort of thing.
The window manager problem was what started all of this. The Mac and Windows Longhorn are both starting to use 3D features (including 2D transparency) in their window managers. With the current XFree set up there is no way to work on something similar for Linux. My simple idea was that xlib is getting pretty old and OpenGL 2.0 is a well designed API. I was also aware of all of the different drivers inside of Xfree. So it occurred to me why not have OpenGL as the base layer. That would provide an excellent platform API and make an easy target for NVidia and ATI. OpenGL works just as well for 2D as 3D. The trend in hardware also supports the OpenGL direction. In a few years 3D hardware is going to be a dirt cheap commodity. Starting from an OpenGL base will leverage that. With the OpenGL base I could start working on a window manager that used 3D features. I thought that this was a better approach than 3D enabling the root window and then hacking the window manager inside of Xfree. For the Xserver the XFree code base could be used. Or something like http://www.directfb.org/xdirectfb.xml might be easier to work with. I need a scheme for getting the 2D Xwindows to draw into textures so that they can be manipulated. I need to do parallel changes to the 3D buffering system too. There is probably a way to make this work on a minimal footprint with 2D only hardware by using a combo of mesa plus stubbing out a lot of functions but I haven't explored that path yet. The embedded Mesa code looks like the best place to start. I wasn't aware of it before. I only knew about FBDRI which is way out of date and doesn' build. Embedded Mesa looks like FBDRI done right. I'm going to be gone a couple of days but when I get back I'll start working on getting the Embedded Mesa code up on my hardware. I'm also considering starting with a user level OpenGL app on DRI and just changing the XDirectFB code to write to a texture. This scheme would work to demo 2D capability but it won't work for a 3D window. ===== Jon Smirl [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- 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
