Re: Why run xserver on the OpenGL API?

On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 15:45, Jon Smirl wrote:
> --- 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.
>
> .../...

OpenGL is one option, if we go all the way through designing a new video
driver model independant from the X server, we probably also want a 2D
accel module for it (at least for cards that don't do GL or not with
an Open Source driver), and so we also want the X server to be able to
use that 2D accel module.

One interesting thing also, if we keep Linus idea of having that kernel
"stub" drivers is while we can't use the CP or ring command buffer of
some cards due to lack of spec, we may still be able to do DMA over
PCI or AGP for things like pixmap and/or Xv blits etc...
which XFree cannot do currently.

Ben.