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

On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Christoph Egger wrote:

>In the beginning of Linux, graphics meant either X or svgalib.
>If you use both at the same time, you can easily crash the
>graphics card and make the system unuseable.
>
>This fact was the start, when GGI (http://www.ggi-project.org/)
>was brought up. But it was discarded by the linux kernel
>developers in a big flamewar in 1997/1998. That caused the
>project to loose many users and developers and it was believed
>to die.
>
>(Ironically, fbdev is getting more and more into the shape of
>KGI in recent development linux kernels... - What has changed
>the kernel developer's mind?)
>
>Development slowed dramatically down, but NEVER really died.
>Recently, there were new releases. (Announcement:
>http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=261778)
>
>The kernel part - KGI (http://www.kgi-project.org/) has been
>redesigned and rewritten from scratch in the meantime. Many
>things you might believe to know (i.e. use of ioctls) are out of
>date now. Nowadays, there are ports of KGI to FreeBSD and
>OpenBSD in development - last one started recently.

There are at least 2 very good reasons:

1) X11 and XFree86 are not Linux or BSD specific.  XFree86 is 
portable to numerous OS platforms on numerous (and growing) 
architectures.  GGI is Linux centric - even if there are ports to 
BSD in development.  They're just that "work in progress" rather 
than something completed and solid.

2) GGI is *not* part of the standard kernel, and unless there is 
some commitment by Linus Torvalds on the Linux side of things, 
and of whomever is responsible for the BSD kernel, and other OS 
kernels to standardize on GGI, then it is very very unlikely that 
that will ever happen.


-- 
Mike A. Harris