> On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Ben Bridgwater wrote:
> > The only other base of preexisting (or soon to be) code is the XFree 4.0
> > acceleration engines, which would be fine too, although they might take more
> > effort to repackage, and that project appears to be understaffed as is.
>
> If they're undermanned, why don't you join them?
Apart from lack of time, I think it'll be a *long* time until there's a portable
XFree-based solution to what I want to do (direct graphics writing from an X
client). Even if/when they provide direct rendering for local X clients, they're
still going to have to tackle the fundamental issue of multiple programs (in this
case multiple X clients plus the server) contending for the graphics hardware. If
this contention were solved with mutexes in the rendering engine, then that would
probably require multi-threading in the server to overcome the client fairness
problems is would create...
I'm rather puzzled why there appears to be so little interest in what seems to be
the obvious solution of Linux adopting graphics device drivers, and solving the
contention issue once and for all. I can understand purists who say "all Linux
graphics should be via X", but a device driver approach would help X purists
just as much (client rendering, server porting, platform stability, etc.) as
people who have other needs for it.
Presumably with the release of 2.2 and introduction of framebuffers, this
hardware contention is going to become much more of an issue. I'm guessing there
will be people who will actually want to *use* the framebuffer in parallel with
X, not just have it "mode switch compatible"... and there's only going to be one
way to fix those problems! ;-)
Anyways, I guess I'll stick to DGA for the time being, until the
contention/portability issue becomes more urgent.
Ben
Please CC: bennyb@ntplx.net
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