"Jon M. Taylor" wrote:
> 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.
>
How? With XGGI?
>
> > * 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.
>
Indeed.
>
> > * 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.
>
I agree completely. I will add that the one of the most important tasks of
every modern OS is handling resources in a wise manner. And graphical and
sound (multimedia) resource can't escape to this rule. Not if you want a
stable system, as you have properly said .
>
> > * 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
