Re: The new X-Kernel !

Jonathan Morton (chromi@cyberspace.org)
Sun, 21 Oct 2001 09:33:34 +0100


> > Boots up with X, that means.
>
>I've never understood why people want X, StarOffice (OpenOffice) etc to be
>moved into kernel space :) IMHO it's strictly user space issue. You can
>start X or gdm/xdm/kdm from a boot script and so on. No kernel modification
>is needed for this.

Probably because they don't know the difference between kernel and
user space. Kinda understandable when you come from a Mac or Windows
background, where (in the former) there is no distinction or (in the
latter) it's so blurred as to make little difference.

And if they *do* understand it, from a dispassionate point of view,
it does seem to make sense to put graphics drivers in the kernel -
they're implemented as "device drivers" in every other desktop OS.
Except MacOS X, where's it's an application layer like glibc, but
nobody understand OS X yet beyond the hardest of developers.

But they don't realise that XFree86 has an *enormous* amount of
developer time behind it, which would need to be duplicated to make
it work in kernel space with full backwards compatibility. Oh, and
did I mention this would all be for one platform - XFree86 is
designed to run on many! It would also bloat the kernel tremendously.

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