Re: [utah-glx-dev] unhooking ourselves from dev-private stuff

[Philip B. <ph...@bo...>]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 09:33:25AM +0100, Svante Signell wrote:
> Just a few thoughts (slightly OT):
> 
> - It would be nice to get rid of X in the future, replacing it with
>   something smaller and more modern in design, maybe Fresco (previosly Berlin-consortium)??
> 
> - Would your outlined changes make it possible to use direct rendering in
> Fresco? 
> 
> - It would be nice to use 3D in the Hurd, preferably without X.


Weeelll.. then you probably would be interested in working on
Mesa directly.
Mesa actually has some hooks for direct graphics card manipulation.
However, most people find it more useful to go through the window system.
There are only very old cards supported "directly" through mesa.
(even older than the utah-glx card support ;-)


There are multiple reasons for this. The first one being that opengl doesnt
handle all the common 2d stuff very well -- it's really geared towards 3d.
whereas X11 has lots of useful stuff for 2d.

The second being that with things like direct rendering extensions, the
speed issue goes away.

The only thing outstanding at that point, is avoiding the overhead of
installing X. Which boils down to 10 megs of extra RAM, and 100 megs of
extra disk space. 

These days, unless you are dealing with semi-embedded stuff, the cost of
disk space and ram make that last issue irrelevant.


As far as using 3d in Hurd -- well, it is very likely that if xfree86 runs
on it, utah-glx wont be any significant difficulty.



PS: I have no idea what fresco is, sorry. Nor would it probably be
appropriate to go into that here.