Neal Tringham wrote:
>
> >What are you really asking for? A documentation on the FX driver (there is
> >lots of stuff in there that I wrote/reworked, but at least as much which I
> >don't really have much background in), or a guide for how to write a modern
> >Mesa driver?
> >
>
> I personally am really looking for the latter, plus (in an ideal world,
> obviously:-)) a guide to how the "new" core pipeline works, since I'm
> afraid I've found it a little tricky to trace some things which might be
> bugs (I'm not sure) through the 3.1 and later cores.
>
> >If you want to write an optimized driver, I'd suggest looking at either the
> >MGA or better still the i810 driver, either from the Utah GLX or DRI
> >repositories on sourceforge - these are both drivers which talk directly to
> >the hardware without an intervening abstraction layer like glide. Despite
> >this, they are both simpler and 'saner' than the current fx driver which has
> >grown a lot of complexity over the years.
>
> Thanks. Am I right in assuming that what I would learn from looking at
> the DRI drivers would apply to builds of Mesa that don't use accelerated
> GLX or any direct equivalent (such as the FX driver built for Windows,
> for example), while the Utah GLX source might be of less general
> relevance? Or is this a stupid question?
The two drivers share a great deal of code, and there isn't much in the driver
itself which is GLX specific. The Utah drivers are self-contained - they are
entirely userspace and have no explicit device-dependent support in the
xserver. The DRI drivers have kernel components and a fair amount of code in
the 2d X server itself. The MGA driver in particular does a lot of the
hardware interaction in kernel space for security reasons.
So, you could really choose either. Utah is a smaller download and the code
is all in one place, DRI demonstrates some approaches to handling multiple
direct clients and other issues on which Utah punts. You may want to compare
and contrast...
Keith
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