ELC/LFCS2009: A tale of two panels [LWN.net]

ELC/LFCS2009: A tale of two panels

Posted Apr 16, 2009 8:59 UTC (Thu) by Gollum (subscriber, #25237)
Parent article: ELC/LFCS2009: A tale of two panels

I find it amusing to see that features proposed by the GGI project back in 1994(!) are finally finding their way into the kernel. Considering the abuse heaped on the GGI developers back then, it is a vindication that what they were trying to do was really the way forward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Graphics_Interface

From the announcement of GGI 0.0.9, in 1998:

What is GGI?
============

GGI - The General Graphics Interface Project is an attempt to
setup a general, fast, efficient and secure interface to graphics
and human-machine interaction hardware for UNIX-like operating
systems. It allows normal applications to have direct but
controlled access to the underlying graphics hardware without
compromising system stability. The basic design consists of
two parts. First a kernel part, which does all the critical
operations that may cause the system to hang or may cause damage
to the hardware. Second is a library, that translates the drawing
requests from applications into 'commands' for the kernel part.

(Log in to post comments)

ELC/LFCS2009: A tale of two panels

Posted Apr 16, 2009 13:03 UTC (Thu) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]

I was thinking about that too. Pity that all that effort was wasted.

ELC/LFCS2009: A tale of two panels

Posted Apr 17, 2009 0:27 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

I remember GGI. As I recall, one of the big problems they had was getting their module into the mainline kernel tree: without users like XFree86, there was no impetus to merge it. And another was getting XFree86 to actually consider switching to using GGI instead of doing their own userspace mode-setting: without mainline kernel support, there was no impetus to merge it.

Thus we had a situation in which neither train can go until the other has passed.

If the GGI project had begun after the big Xodus (sorry!) to X.org, it might have had better success. As it is, it's hardly the first example of a great idea that was just unable to flourish in the environment at the time.