Re: [Dri-devel] Re: future of DRI? -> why no one plays with Glide3.

[Alan C. <al...@lx...>]

On Sun, 2003-03-02 at 00:56, Jon Smirl wrote:
> X has served us well for a long time but I just don't
> think it is sufficient to be the standard video
> platform for desktop Linux over the next ten years.

People were saying that ten years ago. They were wrong
then, and I suspect they are wrong now. Too many people
think X11 == XFree86. XFree86 is an *implementation* 
(arguably two with kdrive) of X11.

> change in the kernel, but X hardly seems to change at
> all. How can we speed things up?

X changes, its just its very good at not breaking stuff
and Xfree itself tends to be deeply conservative, perhaps
overly so. XFree86 has been acquiring render extensions,
rotation, resize on the fly, a sophisticated security model
for partitioning untrusted applications, and much more, its
just nobody noticed most of these except maybe the new
font stuff. 

> I agree that X is very complicated to work on. Mozilla

2D XFree86 is *easy* to work with. It took me a day to learn
how to write input drivers, it took me a couple of days to
learn how the X driver model worked to rewrite the Cyrix driver
to actually work. You can write a 2D Xserver in under a week.
You might spend a while longer debugging it because all the 
hardware has crazy bugs.

2D XFree you copy a driver example, fill in your PCI idents
and your mode switch code. Compile, debug and you have an
unaccelerated X server. You plug in a set of standard Xaa
routines one at a time and you get more and more acceleration.
You copy the Xv example code fill in the blanks and you get
video overlay support.

Since XFree 4.0 you don't have to touch the core code, you
don't have to duplicate a ton of stuff and you don't need
to know zip about DDX, MI and the other core layers.

Alan