> >> This is something to consider. While nVidia and ATI do not > >> actually make native OpenGL cards they do dominate the market to > >> the detriment of the *NIX graphics market. > > > > Solaris is some form of open source now, right? What graphics/video > > chips do Sun's machines use? > > Their 2D board is based on an ATI chip. I presume that ATI gives them > full details. > > The 3D boards use 3DLabs chips. > > I haven't checked to see if there are Open Solaris drivers for them. > > AFAIK, they don't yet offer linux drivers for them.
If there are open source drivers for them, someone could port the drivers to *BSD, Linux, etc. Or use the info in the drivers to write BSD/Linux/etc. drivers if the licence prevented porting. It sure would be nice if Solaris, *BSD, Linux, etc. all used the same driver interface and could share drivers. > > What versions of Unix block I/O to do other things? It is normally > > I/O that gets preference. > > I am talking about user I/O -- mouse and keyboard. > > > You mention "distros", so is this something specific to linux? > > My 400 MHz Linux box (with CONFIG_PREEMPT=y) stops accepting keyboard or > mouse input from time to time. This happens often with Thunderbird and > Konqueror but happens with other apps as well. While this happens, the > disk access LED is flickering so it must be disk access that is blocking > keyboard and/or mouse I/O (i.e user I/O). I'm guessing that Thunderbird and Konqueror are large relative to the amount of main memory, and Linux is paging/swapping. > >> I think that what you need to address this without rewriting parts > >> of the Linux Kernel is to have a CPU dedicated to running X. > > > > If so, someone needs to rewrite the Linux Kernel. > > Yes, this may be needed. The major issue is that GUI apps do not run at > higher priority than other processes (user apps can not be set to nice < > 0 except by root). Also, the app for the window that has focus needs to > have its priority increased automatically. If you change focus to an app that is swapped out, it will take awhile for it to become responsive. Try running top(1) in a window and then getting the problem to happen. If it is memory/paging/swapping, you could add memory, and/or add RAID. You could look into hacking your kernel to give the mouse and keyboard a higher SPL (or whatever this is called in Linux) than disk. Standard warning: Backup your data before running the new kernel, just in case. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
