Hi,

Thomas Steffen wrote:

> > Thank you for this information, so it seems we can't go this way. (I
> > currently consider it impossible to port the whole XFree86 to our
> > operating system, as we don't have anything in common with unix like
> > OSes (and one can consider e. G. OS/2 unix like compared to plurix).
> 
> You might want to have a look at the Linux kernel framebuffer support.
> AFAIK the drivers are rather simple, and "down there" it is not very
> UNIX like either. If you use vesafb, for example, you should be able
> to use nearly every graphics card with only one driver (assuming you
> have a PC style BIOS). 

We already have working native drivers for VGA, some S3 chips, Vesa
1.2/2.0 linear framebuffer and some Radeon chips.

As we have a rather slim API, it is not much work to develop a basic
driver.

Our problem is that we would like to make use of the acceleration and of
some 3D functions (using a subset of opengl), and for this we need
documentation. And as you know, the chipset vendors (especially NVidia
and ATI) don't like to give any useful documentation to others.

One of our programmers got some Radeon docs by signing about a dozen
NDAs, but the doc and the example code differed in what they did (and
both methods failed to initialize the chip), and the precompiled
examples just didn't work (sudden reboots, freezing the machine,
displaying crap etc.). He managed to get 2D and 3D acceleration
nevertheless, but he failed to initialize the T&L engine. And his code
magically fails on newer revisions of the same Radeon chips. ATI didn't
even bother to deny his questions, they just moved them to /dev/null...

So this kind of "support" made us thinking about including drivers of
other operating systems using some glue code.

Markus

-- 
"GPL software is not free - the cost is cooperation"
_______________________________________________
Xpert mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert

Reply via email to