> doing 2d and 3d accel is very complex which mean we need much more time to
> code the emulated device and may be we 'll need to write a specific driver but
> now we need things up and running in a pretty way as we are still in an early
> stage
> if we did a VESA we can run Xwindows,win32,OS/2,BeOS and QNX
> what a good deal!!!!!as i think portability anddifferent guests will be an
> advantage
> and remember the old role KISS "keep it simple stupid"
Allright, perhaps you are correct that VESA would be the simpliest to
implement after VGA. However, higher resolutions, and especially large
color depthes, couldn't work fast in GUI without the hardware-assisting 2D
acceleration. Imagine software-only scrolling 1024x768x32bit across
the PCI/AGP bus - even these probably don't have enough bandwitch, and
even if they had why waste it on operation that should be performed by
accelerator locally?
Also, 2D acceleration implementation shouldn't be THAT complex (in
contrary to 3D). I didn't propose windowed accelerated 3D, only a
full-screen one. The later also wouldn't be very simple I'd imagine,
because it's card-dependent, so the plex86 should be provided with the
hardware resources this particular card uses, to allow direct access
only to these resources, also to save/restore the state of hardware.
Yet simplier than building a whole wrapper.
Another thing that bothers, is that competition is very hard among
card manufacturers, nobody would know if the particular architecture would be
popular in few years. This favours to abstraction of acceleration,
however the need to write custom drivers for guest OS'es makes this
good idea look less attractive..
The idea of multiple video plug-ins for plex86 is nice.
Uhus
