Re: DRI integration

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 20:42, Jon Smirl wrote:
> --- Owen Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Not sure what you mean by "includes font support" here ... having the
> > window manager / compositing manager composite stuff to the screen
> > using OpenGL is very reasonable, but that's basically an independent
> > question from how it draws the window manager decorations. 
> 
> I meant that the font code would be associated with the OpenGL API layer so that
> if you removed the window manager layer you'd still have font support. As
> opposed to building the font support into the window manager code.

Hmm, I'd generally take window manager in the classic X sense of the
client that handles window placement and resizing and draws the window
manager. In the brave new world of composited X, this client will likely
typically be the same as the "compositing manager" - the client that 
draws the windows onto the screen. But in any case it is still just
a client of the rendering API like any other.

> > Note that for this to be useful, we have to get the people
> > writing binary-only drivers "on board" with the new X server
> > architecture. The existing drivers attached to the existing 
> > XFree86 server architecture don't do us any good.
> 
> This won't happen until we have a system running on the open source drivers.

We clearly are going to have a lot easier time doing wor
with open source drivers. And luckily we have open source drivers and
specs for not too ancient cards. 

But the parameters for closed source drivers are different than those
for the open source drivers in ways that going beyond being not open
source (reuse of large chunks of code from Windows drivers, no Mesa),
so engagement in that area at an earlier point rather than a later point
is pretty important.

The hardest thing here is kernel interaction; the kernel people don't
want closed source kernel modules, period. The video card drivers want
to stuff huge chunks of code into kernel space munging the system setup
in arbitrary ways. By contrast the X <=> video driver interface is just
a matter of details.

Regards,
						Owen