Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> So, now that I've bored everyone to sleep, this leaves us with these
> possibilities for Indiana on SPARC:
>
> 1) Ship Xsun binaries & existing SPARC Xsun driver binaries (all closed
> source)
>
> 2) Ship Xorg & use Martux's SPARC graphics drivers (all open source)
> with existing SPARC kernel driver binaries (all closed source)
There is also a third choice I forgot to mention, probably since it's
the least desirable of all:
3) Ship Xorg with only the drivers provided by SPARC graphics (of which
only XVR-2500 is likely to be done by your October proposed timeline),
and leave those with older SPARCs unable to run X in Indiana.
Also, Garrett reminded me of another issue in a message to ogb-discuss [1]
- my prior description only covered 2D graphics, and ignored OpenGL. For
OpenGL, a similar choice will have to be made:
1) Ship existing SPARC OpenGL, with accelerated modules for existing
SPARC graphics cards (closed source - and I don't know if it's
redistributable) - with Xsun, this has acceleration for most of the
mid-to-high end SPARC graphics cards, with Xorg, only XVR-2500 is
known to have usable hardware acceleration - I don't know if the
others will easily work with Xorg or not once the framework is in place.
2) Ship open source Mesa OpenGL, as we do on x86 (and virtually all other
open source OS'es do), accepting that we'll have no hardware acceleration
and break compatibility with existing SPARC OpenGL applications
[1] http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2007-June/001033.html
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
