On Tue, 2003-03-25 at 21:48, Keith Whitwell wrote:
The final point that I would like to make is that we're going to NEED to load the DRI driver on the server-side at some point in order to support accelerated server-side rendering. We could then implemented a server-side software-only "DRI" driver. This driver could then export a wide variety of fbconfigs (16-bit/32-bit/floating-point per channel color for pbuffers) that the underlying hardware doesn't support.
It really shouldn't be that hard. Against it are:
One thing I never understood was whether the server should do this or fork off a client which is just another DRI direct render application that happens to get told to render the GLX commands coming down the connection from the remote host. I've no real feel for the costs of doing it that way, or enough experience to know if I'm talking out of my hat obviously.
Pure server side 3d would be welcome for a lot of the very old hardware too. Its good enough to run screensavers 8)
I am not a big fan of the fork trick.
From a security perspective, people may want to disable direct rendering. There is a shared memory segment that an "evil" program could muck with and cause DoS problems. I probably haven't thought about it enough, but I can't see how would could disable direct rendering AND use the fork method.
Regardless, there would be a fair amount of overhead on every GL call. If I'm not mistaken, the server would have to receive the GLX protocol then send it to another process. There would be the overhead of sending the data to yet another process and the task switch. That on top of the overhead already in the GLX protocol starts to sound very painful.
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