On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 03:41:44PM -0700, Swift Griggs wrote: > Is NetBSD going to play with Wayland? 'Cause X.org seems to be in a bit > shaky and captured by Linux-droids.
I don't know. But all that stuff is shaky and linuxish. > XDMCP ...you use XDMCP? Anyone uses XDMCP, other than to run some vintage X terminals they found in a skip? Or do you mean "remote X display access"? > * Is KMS "just a hack" we support or is it a future X11 direction TNF > embraces? KMS is best thought of as "the linux world finally figures out what everyone else knew by around 1990", that is, you should have device drivers for graphics same as for other hardware, and framebuffer devices exposed to userland that don't require reimplementing drivers in every application (read: X server) wanting to use the framebuffer. Except they apparently don't have it right yet, because the drmkms2 Xorg binary is still setuid root. There were some historical reasons that XFree86 ended up using the MS-DOS model for hardware and drivers, but it was wrong then anyway and there just wasn't a critical mass of people who knew better. As I recall the mindset in the Linux world at the time was that the only alternative to putting all the hardware stuff in the XFree86 binary was to put the entire X server in the kernel. The idea of a different lower-level interface in between there was apparently too much to process. :-| > Doesn't Linux do things in kernel-land that we either can't or > won't do in NetBSD? I'm thinking of all the stuff provided by > ./sys/miscfs/procfs/procfs_linux.c and sys/compat/linux*. Doesn't that > mean we are forever going to be worried more about making sure we > properly ape Linux rather than making anything novel ? Maybe. The problem is: if we venture off in a different direction, that's signing up for a hell of a lot of work. It's probably a bad idea unless upstream and linux go off in a completely unacceptable direction. Until then it's probably better to dissuade them from doing so. That is: if we (for whatever "we") acquire enough of a stake in *their* project, then project politics won't let them blow us off. On the flip side I do feel like a lot of what we get for graphics is crap with an extra order of bleck. If we had infinite resources for development we'd probably do well to design our own thing. Same as if we had inifnite resources for development we'd do well to move Gnome and KDE to the bit bucket and do that right as well. Unfortunately, we don't. > * How do weird X11 framebuffer code for off-the-wall platforms get built? > I'm thinking of things like Amiga's with RetinaZ3 boards. How is it that > these wizards-in-caves can be coaxed out for that, but for x86 we have > to beg for a seat at the table with Linux and Microsoft? I'm just > ignorant of these dynamics. I'm assuming it's because those older > framebuffers are more simplistic or better documented. Yes. Also, there aren't as many of those older non-x86 framebuffers. There's a lot of radeon and nvidia models. (And intelgraphics, and other x86 things before them.) -- David A. Holland dholl...@netbsd.org
