EXA framework question

[Steven J Newbury]

On Sat, 2008-06-14 at 06:47 -0700, Mohan Parthasarathy wrote:
> Hi,
> i am not sure i understand. X itself does not need it but still needed
>  for e.g., text mode console access. Is that what you mean ?
> Mohan
EXA is completely unrelated to fbdev drivers.  DRM will eventually
largely replace fbdev drivers once kernel modesetting support goes
mainstream, at that point X will be using the kernel modesetting
support.  At present, fbdev provides modesetting for console (non-X -
DirectFB, text etc) only while all current X video drivers have built-in
modesetting either through VBIOS calls or by programming the hw
directly. EXA is an acceleration infrastructure for X replacing XAA and
makes use of DRM in some cases to provide higher performance.

There is also a DDX driver for fbdev which uses the kernel fbdev driver
to setup the graphics but provides no hw acceleration.  Various eariler
versions of some video drivers featured a "UseFBDev" option which used
fbdev for modesetting.
> 
> On 6/14/08, Maarten Maathuis <madman2003 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/14/08, Mohan Parthasarathy <suruti94 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> A basic question. If all the drivers are converted to use EXA framework,
> >> then we don't need any drivers
> >> in the kernel (everything in drivers/video), fbdevhw is not needed etc. Is
> >> that right understanding ?
> >>  Or i am completely off ?
> >
> > EXA is only for X drivers, you would still need kernel drivers for
> > framebuffers (for example).
> >