xserver on OpenGL

[Keith Packard]

Around 14 o'clock on Dec 5, Jon Smirl wrote:

> It's going to take Brian, Keithw and myself another month or two to get a full
> standalone OpenGL running. We are missing two major pieces of code, pbuffers and
> mode support. Mode support means I need to get VM86 running and support Int10
> VBIOS calls. 

You might look at the VBE code in kdrive for mode support; it uses VM86 
and runs on most cards.   I suspect it will be easier to use than the 
XFree86 code which has a full x86 emulator built in.  If you'd like help 
in getting that running stand-alone, let me know and I can pitch in a bit.

And, of course we'll need pbuffers for a reasonable X server; not being 
able to draw to pixmaps will make operations "somewhat slow", especially 
now that all rendering is done to pixmaps...

> I would really hate to spend two months extracting the mode code and Int10
> support out of X and then find out the xserver can't run on top of it becuase of
> some technical problem we haven't forseen. Adding framebuffer support will add
> even more time to the OpenGL work before the xserver work can be started.

Ok.  That's quite understandable; I guess I'd thought you were closer to
having running code than this.  If you think the X server will affect your
design, it's even more important that we have some idea of how the X server
will work sooner, rather than later.  I'm pretty confident that we can get
stuff working eventually; I've ported X to several weird graphics systems
in the past.

Why don't I plan on learning a bit more about the OpenGL API and sketching 
out a "real" X server design and see how we can shorten the time to a 
working prototype based on the regular OpenGL API.  If I have some idea of 
how this might work, perhaps we can get some help doing the actual coding 
sometime in January or so.

-keith