Hi,
Stephan wrote:
I´m not the first one with this idea and there was a project called
cosmoe which had the goal of porting the Haiku userland to a Posix
kernel (well, actually, Linux). BeOS/Haiku has some own IPC primitives
(ports and messages for instance) which are unknown to Posix. Cosmoe
is trying to emulate these through shared memory and SysV semaphores.
I think this is a good base for a prototype.
having messages, ports and such has noting to do with X, you can have
them without. In fact, I have all that with GNUstep, with or without X.
GNUstep can run on X, it is convenient since all the handling of the
video driver is done for you, but there is no problem in running the
same on Windows which has not. The applications do not notice that and
do not need that.
It is easy also to write a framebuffer backend and it has been done.
Though framebuffer are different from unix to unix and then you need to
handle acceeration, resolution and all that stuff which, admittedly, X11
handles in an overblown way (dri, xrandr, etc), but handles for you.
Examples for a dedicated display for the GNUstep concept can be found
both in the original NeXT display post script as well as in today's Mac.
The real problem is having efficient, stable and integrated
applications. Thes can be done while running on X11. Writing something
novel would give you something nice, but without substance.
Riccardo
