Pat Kane wrote: > Linda Fellingham wrote: > > I have asked those companies if we could explore open source > > for these drivers > > I understand why Sun can not open up the 3rd party graphics card > device drivers, but could Sun open up the Sun OpenWindows X server > code that dynamically loads DDX handler modules at run time? > Then, with a lot of work, we might teach the Xorg X server to load > the closed source binary device drivers.
I think I've actually published most of that already (see the previous conversations on this subject with Martin Bochnig in the mailing list archives) - it's really just a thin wrapper around dlopen(), nothing fancy. The problem is it exposes to the drivers all the rest of the functions in the Xsun server and shared libraries, so without the source to the entire server, it's not terribly useful. I know we can't publish the source to the entire server - Display Postscript will never be opened by us for instance - I don't know how much of the rest we could publish, but it would be a significant time sink to find out and open source it, and management would have to decide that is worth the effort. It's also running at a different level of abstraction than Xorg - Xorg provides a lot of common code for handling busses and modesetting and such that Xsun does not. I don't know how much added difficulty that will cause. > This Sun document describes the loadable DDX interface from > the device driver writer's point of view: > <http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/802-5903> > I would like to see a version that describes the interface > from the X server writer's point of view. I don't think we have one, since there wasn't a large enough audience of X server maintainers to make it worth the effort. -- -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
