Full-screen behaviour and game documentation

[Callum Lerwick]

>> >> Some games bypass the window manager completely when entering full screen mode
>> >> (using DGA or other ways).
>> >
>> > This should be strongly discouraged.
>>
>> I don't understand much about how DGA works. Could you give an
>> overview of why this should be discouraged?
>
> An explaination of DGA can be found here:
>
> http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/dga.html
>
> It allows an application to bypass X and get exclusive access to the
> framebuffer. One of the advantages is that you can also change bit-depth this
> way, but I guess nobody uses something less than 24 bits these days.

DGA is on its way out, and was never very widely used for anything but
getting raw relative mouse data anyway. (It required running as root
for direct video, IIRC) Can't seem to google up any overall plans, but
for example:

http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2009-September/002056.html

As far as video goes, DGA has been irrelevant for years.