Re: XFree86 5.0 TODO

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 03:24:50PM -0500, Mark Vojkovich wrote:
>    The major problem with the old XAA was that it made too many
> hardware assumptions.  That was necessary to allow XAA to achieve
> one of its goals, that was, to allow people who didn't know anything
> about graphics hardware to write drivers.  We had fewer professional
> graphics people writing XFree86 drivers back then so that was an
> important consideration.  This is less important now.

Mmm,


>    In the new XAA, surface allocation is relegated to the driver,
> which can use any mechanism it wants to allocate these surfaces.

But will it not mean less code sharing if each driver has to do memory
management ?

> I have this working with NVIDIA's binary drivers.  Allocations
> are offloaded to a system-wide allocator in the kernel.  The NVIDIA

In the drm driver, or somewhere else ? And how is this related to Ian's
DRI memeory manager plans ?

> binary drivers use a non-linear framebuffer so this was a good
> test.

What kind of non-linear framebuffer is used (if you are allowed to tell
that is) and do you use a automated conversion unit or something such ?

>    Multidepth support is of interest to the render extension (all
> those 8 bit alpha masks) and in the case of overlays.  

Ok, ...

Friendly,

Sven Luther