The future of Xephyr and Kdriver

[Paulo Zanoni]

Hello Jamey

> 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.

Well, then I guess me and your students are inventing the same wheel...

Recently I've been trying to improve my X skills, so after I finished
xdriverprobe I decided writing a nested Xorg driver would be a good
idea. I had almost no knowledge on video driver internals, so writing
it would be a great way to learn. Unfortunately I had no idea you had
students doing this work, so I started everything from scratch (well,
starting from scratch was even better since I wanted to learn it all).
Right now it is already possible to open apps like firefox and
glxgears inside the driver, but it is still a little bit fragile. My
code is working, but since I had no knowledge on the video driver APIs
there are a lot of things that can be improved and a lot of things
that still have to be written.

So how do we proceed? Should we share our codes, merge them and work
together? Keep doing everything without looking at each other's code
so both of us can learn everything? Abandon everything and try to help
Kristian's project?

In case you're interested, I just uploaded the code to the web:
http://gitorious.org/xf86-drivers-nested

I develop and test it against xorg-server 1.7.7 (yes, I know, it's
old), so it might need a few patches to work in your environment.

Cheers,
Paulo

-- 
Paulo Zanoni