On Sun, 20 Feb 2000, Jim Peters wrote:
> Good question. I was wondering about this - about which part of the code is
> in charge of allocating video memory. Is it the chipset driver, or
> KGI(con) ?
The "chipset driver" == KGI(con). The allocation would be handled by a combination
of the driver and the driver-lib. It's sort of a two way street -- offloading the
functionality into userspace and just having the driver check the requests for
security has the benefit of keeping the kernel drivers simple, but implementing a
standard API in-kernel would help reduce the number of customized driver libs needed.
There's been a lot of correspondence on a generic "feature" API (see the list
archives.)
It would handle all types of features and would integrate in some way with the
mode parameters to allow the negotiation of features vs each other and vs the video
mode.
Probably what needs to be done is pick one feature that people need the most and
implement it in the form of the feature negotiation API -- but with the back-end
being a simple hack because even though the API is generic, only one feature has
been implemented, then work on making it handle more than one type of feature.
BTW, we should accumulate all the old list traffic about this in one file and post it
on the website for easy access because this thread comes up so often.
--
Brian
