[Xorg] X on OpenGL

[Adam Jackson]

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On Saturday 10 July 2004 01:08, Keith Packard wrote:
> Around 23 o'clock on Jul 9, Adam Jackson wrote:
> > It might be more accurate to say that the goal is to make the X
> > server a DRI client rather than an OpenGL app.
>
> While that would be possible, that's not my goal -- if GL is available, I'd
> rather just use that for the driver API.  We may want a few extensions, but
> the X server should be able to run on plain unextended GL. David Reveman
> and Peter Nilsson show us with Glitz just how feasible this is; glitz
> provides essentially all of the Render semantics on GLX and AGL (with WGL
> support coming soon).

Yes; I hesitated even saying it, because someone might misread it as giving 
nVidia users the shaft, what with their non-DRI GL drivers.  Hence 'might'.

> Where GL isn't available, we'll do something else, probably using some of
> the research that Eric Anholt has done on the R128/Radeon cards (although
> those happen to have nice GL acceleration too).

One thing I've been wanting for a while is a DRI driver that is purely 
software fallback.  I hacked out a skeleton for it, but it needs a lot more 
work.  There's several advantages to getting it working:

- - Classic X servers can load that instead of GLcore, paving the way for 
accelerated indirect rendering
- - Clients draw right on the window instead of hitting the X server with 
millions of XPutPixels
- - Opportunity for DGA-style acceleration for non-3D cards
- - Base class for people to derive new hardware drivers from
- - Could act as dumb framebuffer driver for solo (does drivers/dri/fb even work 
anymore?)

etc.  I hope to get it working after fixing things for the libdl loader.

- - ajax
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