Re: The new X-Kernel !

Jonathan Morton (chromi@cyberspace.org)
Sun, 21 Oct 2001 10:13:40 +0100


> > 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.
>
>:) It would be interesting to learn more on it (if infomartion is available).
>afaik it's a unix like system in its core.

Take a look around Apple's site, particularly the developer section.
There's documentation in spades if you can read PDFs. Fact, that's
one of the best things about Apple - they document nearly everything
in public view.

> > 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.
>
>Also it would be nice if frame buffer can support 3D hw accelerated
>gfx functions.
>And so on. So probably a better interaction should be implemented between
>various gfx elements of a tipical Linux system. [I don't know GGI very well
>but AFAIK its goals are very interesting]

Come to think of it, the kernel already supports a fair amount of
video hardware, through framebuffer. I don't know how capable that
is, though, beyond displaying and scrolling text in various
resolutions, and as a place for XFree86 to fall back to. If fbdev is
accelerated, some kind of userspace utility and kernel-space cleanup
would potentially allow fully-accelerated (including 3D?) graphics,
with much of the hard work in kernel space. Or is fbdev just a dumb
framebuffer and I'm totally off track?

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from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
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