Defining Seats

[Daniel Stone]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 03:44:19PM -0400, ext Chris Tyler wrote:
> There is a lot of interest in doing multiseat on multiple-output video cards:
> - low-end solutions - one card for economy
> - laptops - internal and external monitors as separate seats
> - high-density multiseat - 2-4 outputs per card, 5-7 cards per system
> 
> Right now this is usually done with Xephyr, Xnest, or perhaps Xgl (?) on
> top of a multi-screen base server; eventually we'll need better ways of
> doing this.
> 
> It would a shame to completely preclude the possibility of a
> multiseat-on-one-GPU configuration (or make it hard to configure).
> Imagine the win if you could add multiseat capability to a system just
> by plugging a monitor into a secondary video output and adding a USB
> keyboard and mouse.

Well, given the extremely limited resources, and huge complexity of all
this (you need to have two _completely_ separate X servers in terms of
how they interface with clients, but somehow have them completely share
the card and its resources -- this amounts to something very close to a
server rewrite), it's just not even remotely high on the todo list.

> Perhaps for now we need a general framework in GPM for nested X servers;
> if it's toggled on, a hotplugged monitor would be added to the
> bottom-level server as a new screen, then a new top-level (Xephyr or
> equivalent) server would be started to provide a new seat.

That would be the best solution: you need separate servers, so might as
well actually have separate servers.

> If this can't happen automagically (which is admittedly hairy) then we
> need a manual way of configuring it.

You need a manual way of configuring it, yes.

Cheers,
Daniel
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