The future of Xephyr and Kdriver

[Feng, Haitao]

Hi Jamey,

Thank you very much for your reply!

Have you noticed Kristian's Wayland project? In an email discussion,
Kristian mentioned the "Xorg on Xorg" idea and discussed its design and
implementation. Quoted from the email: 

"I imagine a new module called 'hosted' that lets the DDX drivers detect
that they're running under an existing display server (Xorg or wayland)
and then use that instead of KMS for modesetting and allocating front
buffers.  Ideally this can be done in a way so that the DDX driver
doesn't need to know what the host display server is, but just
interfaces with the 'hosted' module.  Then there will be a little bit of
code that each DDX driver needs to add that talks to the 'hosted' module
to get the DRM fd, to set the front buffer and to post damage."

Is it the "Xephyr-like video driver for Xorg DDX" you are going to
achieve?

I will learn and investigate the "Xorg on Wayland" project. From SDK
developer's point of view, "Xorg on Xorg" has the same functionality of
Xephyr to display the MeeGo applications. If "Xorg on Xorg" is better, I
will go for it. With this said, I am still willing to maintain Xephyr if
you need a maintainer here.

Thanks
-Haitao

On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 04:23:53AM +0800, jamey at minilop.net wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Feng, Haitao <haitao.feng at intel.com> wrote:
> > I'd like to know what is the future of Xephyr and Kdriver from your point of
> > view. Will you still need someone maintain Xephyr? I am willing to maintain it
> > if needed.
> 
> I wouldn't discourage someone from maintaining any part of X they
> like. However, Josh Triplett and I are currently mentoring a team of
> students at Portland State University to see if they can build a
> Xephyr-like video driver for the X.Org DDX. Their project will end in
> March 2011. These students have no background in X development, so
> there are certainly risks to the project. But if it goes well then I'm
> hoping we'll have a good basis for replacing Xephyr, Xnest, and Xdmx.
> 
> The students just started work, and are sorting out the usual build
> environment issues. We're encouraging them to show up on this list or
> IRC as they get into the actual development, so hopefully you'll all
> get to monitor their progress and perhaps offer helpful feedback. If
> you feel the need to flame them, please mail me privately instead and
> I'll have a talk with them. :-)
> 
> GL acceleration is not likely to happen by March--I'm not even sure
> the driver will have input support, given how painful that is for
> Xephyr et al today. If you want to use Xephyr for Meego development
> now, you might want to continue your work regardless of how these
> students do.
> 
> Jamey