[Xorg] The big multiconsole nasty

[Egbert Eich]

Jon Smirl writes:
 > --- Egbert Eich <eich at pdx.freedesktop.org> wrote:
 > > 
 > > No, from an X point if view this is entirely irrelevant. From a
 > > hardware driver layer this will be relevant on OSes that don't 
 > > handle these things thru the kernel. 
 > >
 > > I would think 85-90 percent of the users can be served well without
 > > it. The other 10-15 percent are users of older versions of Linux 
 > > and users of other less popular OSes.
 > >
 > > We can either go and tell theese to go get lost and seek support 
 > > elsewhere or we can add some reasonable fallback support for OSes
 > > that don't provide these features.
 > >
 > 
 > Or we can just push hardware support like this to an external library.
 > On Linux 2.6 this library will be tiny since most things are handled by
 > the OS. On other platforms the library may be much larger. Resetting
 > secondary cards is also something that should be handled externally
 > since X is not the only client for these.

Actually I'm currently thinking of an external daemon for such things
as some things are stateful and we need to be able to preserve states
accross applications.
 > 
 > A good place to start would be to extract the existing code from X and
 > convert it to a standalone library. I have tried doing this twice but
 > the existing code is very, very intertwined into the X server. Both
 > times I have given up because I got tired of fixing hundreds of
 > dependencies between the library and the X server.

Right. Since I wrote a lot of this stuff I might be the right person to
do this. Actually I have plans to do this ASAP.

 > 
 > Building this library would determine the API that is needed. Once the
 > API is settled we can build a Linux 2.6 version that has all of the
 > redundant code removed.
 > 

Right. I'll do my best ;-) However I expect I will not arrive at the 
complete solution the first time around. 

Cheers,
	Egbert.