LCA: Two talks on the state of X

Gallium3D should help with that, I believe. It's a very nice idea, at least. Should support
all OSes, including Windows if you really want it to.

http://www.tungstengraphics.com/gallium3D.htm

It should reduce complexity for drivers and thus the OS-specific stuff will be easier to make.

There's no need to lose the mode setting code entirely. Just leave it in an OS-interaction
section that's used for OSes that don't have mode setting and do allow direct access to the
graphics device. (On the other hand, are there any platforms that aren't open-source and give
the open-source X server direct access to the video card?)

As far as I know BSD's are using xfree, not xorg. Others that have a problem with that can
also just use xfree86.

I'm just wondering what other platforms... x drivers are mainly Linux BSDs and OSOL

I'm not sure of another kernel that ppl might care about hw drivers on

I don't understand why this issue is always brought up. Technical improvements _can_not_
become dependent on least common denominator or your so called "portability". I say f#$%
portability! There are people motivated to improve _currently_broken_ things on Linux. If
other people have problems with that they'd better get _working_ and not whine that people are
not doing their work.

Sorry for the harsh words but it's the reality.

Rui

In the name of cross-OS portability, for the last 2 decades, X has done it's own hardware
management. [*]  
The effect of this is that while X is nicely portable from one OS to another, the portability
from one generation of hardware to the next got severely compromised, and more than a few
times X needed expanding or changing for this reason. And even more times, the OS kernel, such
as Linux, grew nasty workarounds to keep older versions of X working on newer HW or newer
kernels. 

Lets face it: 
It's the kernels job to manage system resources; doing that twice is a bad mistake. It's also
a kernels job to abstract hardware to a large degree..

For all intents and purposes, this makes the current X part of the kernel (logically). In that
light, the current split is rather bad, and needs to be fixed (and is getting fixed
thankfully). 


[*] Yes I know this is getting fixed.

 Another solution is to keep the video mode set by the bootloader, using the manufacturer
BIOS, before switching to protected mode.
 The video manufacturer can do whatever he likes at init in his BIOS, the kernel just manages
framebuffers, the X server just enables optimisations over framebuffer once it has recognised
the hardware - if X does not recognise the hardware it still works - but slower.
 Another advantage for CRT users (vs LCD screen) is that parameters like screen size/position
do not change depending on the operating system.