Re: How about running X on top of something else?

On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 11:28:45AM +0100, Jos Hulzink wrote:
> Fbdev was never ment to do accelleration in the first place. Fbdev drivers are 
> not portable. When you really think about using the fbdev drivers as bottom 
> layer of X, you'll get a X server that has very OS and driver specific 
> features, for the fbdev driver is only available at Linux, and hacked into 
> FreeBSD. As long as there is no cross platform driver, you will be unable to 
> say: Just use this driver, and you'll have a full featured X system.

fbdev is an _api_, and portable kernel drivers aren't liked very much
in Linux, and that's for a reason.

> KGI has a simple thought in mind that we only see back at the X drivers and 
> some commercial stuff: A driver must be able to run on any platform, with 
> only a recompile.

That's a very good reason to not include it in the Linux Kernel :)  It
means you just created yet another UDI and let people write for some
glue API that can never use all features of the Linux-native APIs.

> Besides, fbdev was yet to be invented when GGI was started.

I'm not sure how old GGI is around exactly, but fbdev was widely used on
non-x86 Linux platforms when I first heard of GGI (about 1998).

> Linus just didn't 
> like the idea of graphic drivers in a kernel, and our project team was so 
> small that we were unable to get our project goals clear.

Even you current project goals don't look like they match up with the
Linux kernel's..