Why run xserver on the OpenGL API?

--- Kendall Bennett <[email protected]> wrote:
> Jon Smirl <jonsmirl-/[email protected]> wrote:
> > 4) xserver modified to use the GL API.
> 
> Honestly I don't see the point of building an X server to live on top of 
> an OpenGL implementation. At the lowest level OpenGL is broken down into 

Think of OpenGL as being the device driver API for graphics hardware.

Doing this has several nice effects:

1) OEMs like NVidia/ATI have a very high level device driver API to do their
optimizations below.

2) With OpenGL under xserver all windows will always have the OpenGL API
available. xlib can slowly phased out. OpenGL is a well designed API suitable of
the next 10 years. 

3) OpenGL as the device driver API will allow for 10 years worth of hardware
improvements. 2D APIs are at the end of life in term of chip improvements. Most
3D functions that are done in Mesa software today will be done in hardware is a
few years.

4) 90% of new hardware is 3D capable today. In 10 years year 100% will be. The
bandwidth demands of a display in 2010 with a 10K by 10k floating point
framebuffer on a GPU will be enormous. 

5) Legacy or low end hardware is not left out either. Just run software Mesa and
accelerate what you can. Common programs like window managers and editors will
know this and have modes for avoiding use of complex 3D operations -- like an
option to turn off 3D eye candy.

In ten years we are going to have GPUs that execute OpenGL as their native
instruction stream, we are halfway there already. X's internal architecture has
to change now if we are going to benefit from this several years from now. 

MS Longhorn has already made the switch - GDI to DirectX. This ensures that the
graphics hardware vendors are going to keep improving and making graphics
hardware even cheaper. Linux and xserver need to ride this trend.

Think of the future - enabling 3D support everywhere will allow new applications
to be built that haven't even been dreamed of yet. Here's a simple one: why
should toolkits make buttons with bitmaps giving a fake 3D appearance when you
could just draw a 3D button? Think about moving the light source around on a
desktop drawn with a true 3D toolkit.

=====
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl-/[email protected]

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