mesa-solo status

[Jon Smirl]

> 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.

Right now we have miniglx up on a bunch of cards. miniglx (mesa-solo, same
thing) relies on fbdev for it mode setting, initialization, etc. 

Most of the fbdev drivers don't support DDC so I started building DDC support
into miniglx. DDC support also makes Int10 support necessary. We also figured
out that once we get DDC support into miniglx we didn't really need fbdev
anymore. So Eric made a few minor tweaks to DRM to allow for the complete
removal of fbdev. So right now I am working on the DDC support library and then
making changes to the card specific drivers to use it.

Software Mesa has pbuffer support but pbuffers have never been implemented on
accelerated hardware. I'm hoping keithw is going to help out on this one
(keith???). The only existing pbuffer implementations are the proprietary
drivers from ati/nvidia. Implementing pbuffers requires change both in the
hardware drivers and DRM modules.

mini-glx also has no API for framebuffer access. That would need to be written
too.

Scitech has all of the DDC/mode support finished in their standalone drivers,
but they won't GPL the ATI version. ATI is the main hardware we use for Mesa
work. So we are at an impasse on that path.

The plus side here is that miniglx has a full accelerated OpenGL API up on a lot
of hardware. The downside is that it is a miniGLX not a fullGLX and we need the
full version. 

Since miniglx (mesa-solo) is standalone we also don't want to implement GLX.
Brian is designing IGL which is a GLX equivalent which is not tied to all of the
X header files.


=====
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@yahoo.com

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