Re: Why run xserver on the OpenGL API?

Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> 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.

Note that future cards won't have a 2D engine at all.

Keith