Re: [Trion-kernel-dev] More resources

[Jeff W. <jw...@ne...>]

On Friday 02 December 2005 10:11, Daniel Raffler wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
> nice to see that you're still around..

It's good to be back, and see some new activity :)

My (previously rediculously busy) job at Liberate has calmed slightly in that 
we were bought out by Comcast and Cox cable... as such, projects have 
changed, etc, and I've had a little bit more free time.

> > 1. "alpha" bitmap.  In this case, the window is still a rectangle (the
> > smallest rectangle that will encompase the entire window shape) with a
> > coresponding bitmap which controls which pixels are visible or not.
> > 2. span-buffers.  In this case, for each horizontal line, there's a
> > linked-list of visible spans.
>
> The first methode is pretty much what I had in my mind as I thought it
> could be done really fast provided that we get hardware support for
> blitting with a transparent color up. Since it however doesn't seem as if
> the xfree86 drivers support this technique I agree with you that the
> second approach should be better.

Another technique would simply be to support full RGBA from the get-go... 
which, imo, is a good idea anyway.  In that case, a shaped window is no 
different then a regular window... it just has fully (or even partially) 
transparent pixels.

Presenting an application with a constant RGBA-8888 colour depth and 
internally dithering down to the actual hardware levels has always sounded 
appealing to me, as long as the processors could handle it... which they can, 
now.  OpenGL's system of 0.0..1.0 could also be used.

> > In any event, as Stephen mentioned, this isn't stuff that belongs in a
> > kernel.
>
> I sure didn't write an 18 pages paper about nano-kernel design to put such
> things in the kernel ;)

Speaking of which, where is the final version?  I haven't read the whole 
thing, and I think my version is dated.

> - Each mouse/keyboard/graphicard has a driver of its own that multiplexes
> the device
> - All HIDs give the terminal server full access to their resources
> - The terminal server creates a binding between the devices
>
> To support multiple clients per machine all that would have to altered is
> the terminal server, which is probably the part that comes closest to x11
> in my design.

While this question isn't overly relevant in this stage of the game, I'm 
curious as to what people think in eventually implementing (ie, porting) an 
x11 server to trion?

> > This is all part of a windowing system which is one of the final steps in
> > osdev, imo.
>
> It's definitly not a top priority but nevertheless eyecandy is still the
> best way to get some attention from the community and attract new
> developers..

Certainly, but much needs to be completed before a GUI can even begin 
development.

Speaking of which, we need to rally up the troops and get a coding plan setup, 
I think.  I need to brush up on all things Trion, and get acquanted with the 
new design.

What does everyone think are the things that need the most work?

Cheers,
Jeff