On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, Jon M. Taylor wrote:
> Linus would just say what he has always said:
>
> * Show me the code
> * Direct Rendering is necessary for performance reasons
Woops, I accidentally posted this before I finished arguing those
points:
> * Running X as a trusted userspace binary is OK
It isn't necessary anymore, even with DRI.
> * X is not obsolete
X is quite obsolete. That is an entirely separate issue from
whether the kernel should establish a device driver interface for
accellerated video rendering and general video hardware resource
management.
> * Who will maintain KGI in the kernel?
The current maintainers, plus other people who will see it
distributed with the kernel sources and become a contributor in the grand
free software tradition. That's the way it usually works.
> * The abstraction is unnecessarily complex
It is complex enough to properly abstract and virtualize access to
the video hardware resources and capabilities, which is as complex as it
needs to be. OS designers do not have the luxury of saying that certain
features don't need to be accounted for, because leaving out "features"
leads to dangling nodes in the graph of all legal hardware states, which
leads to system instability.
> * He doesn't like UDI
Steffen's implementation is pretty lightweight. Most of it is in
the driver layer. You _can_ write monolithic drivers if you want. As far
as driver portability is concerned, that is vitally necessary for
maintenance reasons alone. Rewriting any substantive portion of a driver
for a given PCI device should not have to be done more than once. It puts
a brake on hardware development progress.
Jon
---
'Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in
becoming one with God.'
- Scientist G. Richard Seed
