cfb conversion effort (was Re: Debugging X.org drivers?)

[Alan Coopersmith]

Adam Jackson wrote:
> Since RedHat wrote the sunleo driver in the first place, presumably they care 
> about it more than Sun does ;). 

I would assume most of the Sun frame buffer support in the Xorg tree these days
(other than the truly ancient stuff Sun contributed in the late 80's era) is
from people who have tried to give new life to old SPARC hardware by running
BSD or Linux on it, so those people are probably much more important to ask
about removing support than anyone here at Sun is.   Perhaps someone there even
cares enough to help port it from cfb to fb.

> Whether that's the one in the xf86 DDX, 
> or one from Xsun (if that gets opened up like Sun seems to be threatening to 
> do and like I hope they do), I don't really have a preference.

Don't hold your breath waiting for one from Sun.   While our group (the core,
platform-independent X group) has a pretty free reign to contribute things from
our tree to Xorg (provided we own all the rights and meet various other simple
criteria), we don't have the Xsun DDX'es in our tree for most hardware.   Most
of the SPARC graphics cards had drivers & DDX'es provided by the hardware group
that produced the boards - they have their own source trees for those and thus
would have to decide on their own to contribute them.   The Sun Ray and x86 
driver groups similarly have their own trees for their code.

Some of the drivers for current hardware may get released via the upcoming
OpenSolaris project, but I believe current plans for that limit it to the
Solaris 10 source tree and not Solaris 2.6 or earlier, as would be needed for
sunleo support.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering