Re: [Dri-devel] Re: Announcement

[Gareth H. <gar...@ac...>]

Digital Z-Man wrote:
> 
> > There is a project on sourceforge to create a new X server from
> > scratch.  "linuxgfx"
> >
> > While it is a cool idea, it will take 10 years to complete.
> > XFree86 wont be sitting idle for that time.  It is easy to say
> > "scrap XFree86", and I agree that it is a huge amount of code,
> > and that a lot of it is a mess, but nobody is going to just dump
> > it and start rewriting something from scratch all of a sudden
> > and start using it.
> 
> Ok, maybe I was exaggerating a bit here...I meant scrap XFree86
> in its present form.  Keep the server, the networking code, and 2D
> primitives.  The fact that the newbie has to understand the X11 Server
> codebase IN ADDITION to the DRM tells me there's alot of coupling
> going on.  Maybe this was done for the sake of efficiency, but it just
> makes the newcomer shun away from helping out.

Even though this is way OT, I'll add this:  I do not understand the X11
codebase.  Not one bit.  Never even looked at it, probably never intend
to.  Do I need to understand this in order to work on the DRI/Mesa
drivers?  Nope.  At a bare minimum, I'd need to know how the Mesa Device
Driver (DD) interface works, and have a basic understanding of OpenGL. 
This would allow me to work on the client-side driver code
(xc/lib/GL/mesa/src/drv/*).  Having more knowledge about the internals
of Mesa certainly helps, and if you're keen you can check out the
chipset specific stuff in the DRM (which is fairly closely tied to the
client-side driver code mentioned above, and mainly deals with DMA
transfers etc).  No one ever said it would be easy to pick up, but it's
not like you have to have a working knowledge of the entire X server to
work on the 3D drivers...

-- Gareth