Display specification

[Brian Paul]

Alex Deucher wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 12:30:42 -0500, Adam Jackson <ajax at nwnk.net> wrote:
> 
>>On Monday 14 March 2005 12:10, Brian Paul wrote:
>>
>>>Adam Jackson wrote:
>>>
>>>>So we want a device specifier.  Are PCI strings good enough?
>>>>
>>>>EGLDisplay dpy = eglGetDisplayForWidgetXXX("pci/0000:01:00.0");
>>>>
>>>>As long as there's a unique identifier for a device on a given bus, this
>>>>works, so basically that's everything except ISA.  Not very GL-ish to
>>>>pass a string in as an argument, I suppose.
>>>
>>>The sample code I'm working on does something like that.  I think it
>>>would be acceptable to pass a string.  Could we also have a more
>>>general syntax, like "screen/0" or "screen/1"?  That way we wouldn't
>>>tie the interface to PCI-based devices.
>>
>>Sure, we probably should.  The reason for the pci/ part was so we could map
>>this to other bus types.  MCA, SBus, and NuBus have addressable slots.  VLB
>>and ISA don't, but there you could just say isa/0 and just live with only
>>supporting on device on the ISA bus.  (Not that I know of any NuBus cards
>>with 3D engines, but you may want to drive them with Mesa's swrast anyway.)
>>
>>Bus-addresses are admittedly user-hostile.  So we need a mapping between
>>'screen/0' and 'pci/01:00.0'.  And we can't just push that down into the
>>driver because the driver we choose is based on the screen we're asking for.
>>Neither do I really want an implicit mapping that depends on the order you
>>walk the bus, because that can change (firmware upgrades, hotplugged cards,
>>USB and PCMCIA displays).
> 
> 
> Also on the subject of hotplug stuff, this scenario mght be nice:
> walk into a conference room with a big screen connected to a
> remotehost.  you connect to the LAN and you get a message, "remote
> display remotehost:/pci/01:00.0" is available would you like to
> connect to or extent your desktop onto this screen?"  How woudl this
> screen be accessed?  Perhaps that is beyond the scope of this API...

Sounds interesting, but a bit outside the scope of the immediate project.

-Brian