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

Jos Hulzink <[email protected]> wrote:

> >I still don't understand why you simply did not use the fbdev framework
> >for this ? This is i believe one of the reasons GGI failed, because it
> >tried to redesign everything, without taking into account any of the
> >stuff that pre-existed at that time.
> ...
> Fbdev was never ment to do accelleration in the first place. Fbdev drivers are 
> not portable. 

What exactly do you feel is so unportable about fbdev? I have been 
playing with the fbdev interface for the last few weeks, and although 
there are areas that could be improved a lot (ie: no current mechanism to 
query available display modes that the hardware can support), I don't see 
anything that is inherently non-portable. The interface on Linux is 
basically just a bunch of IOCTL calls, so should be portable to any 
Unix'ish system, or even to Windows/OS2 style system as device drivers 
export IOCTL's on those platforms also.

So, with that said, can you explain where and how fbdev you consider 
fbdev to be unportable (and how KGI is more portable)? I am not flaming 
you here, I would just like some more information. I don't have the time 
to sift through the KGI source code to see how it works ;-)

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

If your approach to getting KGI accepts in Linux is more along the lines 
of 'a new internal implementation of the existing fbdev API', you would 
probably have a much higher chance of getting it included in stock 
kernels. Requiring a totally new interface is a waste of everyones time. 
Instead extend fbdev with the features you would like to see exposed for 
GGI (and write a layer inside fbdev to allow KGI 'modules' or whatever to 
be used to implement the fbdev interface).

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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