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X portability is also a trap

Posted Feb 10, 2008 21:32 UTC (Sun) by arjan (subscriber, #36785)
In reply to: LCA: Two talks on the state of X by flewellyn
Parent article: LCA: Two talks on the state of X

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.


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X portability is also a trap

Posted Feb 10, 2008 22:42 UTC (Sun) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Oh, I agree.  I'm just hoping that this is solvable by, say, exporting a uniform interface for
the driver-level stuff on all OSes.

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