The future of Xephyr and Kdriver

Jamey Sharp jamey at minilop.net
Mon Nov 8 08:01:16 PST 2010


On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 1:45 AM, Feng, Haitao <haitao.feng at intel.com> wrote:
> Have you noticed Kristian's Wayland project? In an email discussion,
> Kristian mentioned the "Xorg on Xorg" idea and discussed its design and
> implementation. Quoted from the email:
>
> "I imagine a new module called 'hosted' that lets the DDX drivers detect
> that they're running under an existing display server (Xorg or wayland)
> and then use that instead of KMS for modesetting and allocating front
> buffers.  Ideally this can be done in a way so that the DDX driver
> doesn't need to know what the host display server is, but just
> interfaces with the 'hosted' module.  Then there will be a little bit of
> code that each DDX driver needs to add that talks to the 'hosted' module
> to get the DRM fd, to set the front buffer and to post damage."

That's fascinating. I haven't heard Kristian mention the 'hosted'
module idea before.

That approach should get great performance for nested displays, and
sounds fairly easy to implement. It only works if both servers are
running on the same machine though. Obviously that's an important use
case, and covers what you need for Meego. It doesn't address several
other use cases we care about, where there are one or more backend X
servers on different machines.

Our project will go ahead on a pure X basis. If somebody builds this
'hosted' module, maybe at some point in the future we could find a way
for the two to cooperate. Something like, if the backend server has
working DRI2 then try loading the hosted and hardware drivers
automatically?

Jamey


More information about the xorg-devel mailing list