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Re: kernel/xorg disconnectRe: kernel/xorg disconnectPosted Apr 18, 2008 23:01 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)In reply to: Re: kernel/xorg disconnect by Duncan Parent article: Stable kernel 2.6.25 released
The kernel isn't going to do OpenGL. Doesn't want to do OpenGL. Doesn't need to do OpenGL. OpenGL is huge. The kernel is interested only in mediating userspace access to your graphics hardware. So it does not need to care whether you are sending co-ordinates mixed with color information in the form of 16-bit "half precision" floating point values, which is something you might do with OpenGL -- but instead only cares about whether your userspace program has permission to write to this particular part of the card's RAM, or to twiddle some particular register in the chipset. And yes, like the other poster said, OpenGL already runs fine using GLX on a remote machine, so long as you have enough bandwidth, and a good enough driver. nVidia's (sadly proprietary) driver, plus a cheap 1000baseT network, is enough to play relatively recent 3D games on one machine, with the display on another. I've seen Quake 3 played that way a few years back, and one of the MMORPGs. Network transparency already applies just the same to 3D graphics as with 2D.
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Re: kernel/xorg disconnect Posted Apr 21, 2008 5:07 UTC (Mon) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link] The kernel isn't going to do OpenGL. Doesn't want to do OpenGL. Doesn't need to do OpenGL. OpenGL is huge. The kernel is interested only in mediating userspace access to your graphics hardware. Do correct me if I'm wrong -- isn't the job of the kernel to not only mediate access, but also to abstract hardware? Allowing a user-space program to twiddle a particular register (chip specific, by implication) sounds like weaselly half-a-driver here and half-a-driver there approach. The second part of the driver allegedly lives in user-space, but for all intents and purposes it's an extension to the kernel -- this "user-space" program is directly banging the hardware. Shouldn't the kernel provide a set of primitives on which a hardware-neutral OpenGL / Xorg is built in userspace ?
Re: kernel/xorg disconnect Posted Apr 21, 2008 19:18 UTC (Mon) by Spudd86 (subscriber, #51683) [Link] OpenGL is a massive abstraction, what might make sense is for the kernel to provide an abstraction that is more low level and closer to the hardware than OpenGL that a generic OpenGL implementation can be built on. This is essentially what the Gallium3D people are working on making, although I can't recall how much of that stuff is gonna be in kernel. Modern 3D hardware can be driven primarily by writing to it's memory so the driver can actually run in userspace for little or no penalty, possibly even requiring fewer transitions from kernel to userspace and so actually being faster, this however applies slightly less to older less general graphics hardware. To find out lots about this sort of thing poke around on the nouveau wiki since the direction taken by them is likely to be the direction taken by other open source drivers, and they are moving some things into the kernel that are at the moment userspace only things.
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