Xegl lives!

[Eric Anholt]

On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 18:05 +0100, Torgeir Veimo wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 09:56 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> > Jon Smirl wrote:
> > > I have no expectations that users can switch now. But we have a very
> > > small pool of developers and splitting them between projects really
> > > slows things down. Xorg is working just fine, can't we just leave it
> > > be and work on getting Xgl ready?
> > 
> > I mainly keep quiet on Xgl, but could part of the problem in getting
> > developers be that your plans there seem so Linux-centric that the
> > developers who contribute to Xorg because it runs on so many other
> > OS'es are uninterested in your work and don't want to contribute to
> > reducing the cross-platform portability of X?
> 
> What's so linux centric about EGL?

Nothing.  What's linux-centric is Xegl's requirement of Linux fbdev.

I don't see how we're going have our future X server usable on multiple
platforms (as Xorg is now) without shared code (in userland, I believe)
for mode setting.  All I've heard from anyone involved with Xgl is "mode
setting goes in your kernel fbdev driver."  Mode setting, by far the
most complicated part of X driver writing including Render acceleration,
implemented per-kernel sounds even worse than the current multiple
implementations of rendering.

This is why I think KAA is necessary in the short term.  Until someone
comes up with a plan to deal with modesetting (and I've been actively
avoiding dealing with modesetting -- see Xati), non-Linux won't be able
to use it on much.  I think FreeBSD's kernel would be able to do VESA
modesetting in 6.x with patches, poorly, and mach64 in 6.x, poorly.
Maybe s3 virge, poorly, too, I don't remember.  I'll go ahead and expand
that: I don't think it'll be usable on Linux either.  Last time I used
linux fbdev (ATI hardware, about 6 months ago) it was just about as bad
as all the previous times I tried using it on various cards on intel
hardware.  Not to put down the Linux ATI fbdev developers (benh rocks),
but pretending that all of our OSes will just sprout quality mode
setting on their own is absurd.  It's nasty stuff.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                     eta at lclark.edu
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/              anholt at FreeBSD.org