removing PCI dependency from xserver

[Alan Coopersmith]

Gaetan Nadon wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-09-01 at 18:00 +0300, Tiago Vignatti wrote:
>> Please, I need feedback here to keep with this work. Mark, do you have
>> some
>> suggestions how to proceed? Once I've done with 1. and .2 I can roll my
>> bus-cleanup-take3 tree [2] again and conditionalize libpciaccess from the
>> server.
>>
> If you do succeed in making libpciaccess conditional, you should review
> the configuration
> of all 55 drivers listed in util/modular/build.sh. Some assume
> libpciaccess is always available,
> others treat it as optional as it may have been so in the past. Many
> drivers build the lastest
> versions with older servers.

It's not that it was optional in the past, but that it didn't exist in the
past.   Xorg servers 1.3 & earlier had their own PCI handling code that
was replaced with the newly created libpciaccess in Xorg 1.4.   Drivers are
safe to assume libpciaccess if they only support Xorg 1.4 & later, but as
many enterprise distros still ship older versions (I believe RHEL 5 has
Xorg 1.1, I know Solaris 10 has Xorg 1.3), driver maintainers, especially
those employed by the hardware vendors, may wish to continue to support
those so that new hardware can be used by enterprise distro customers.

Many drivers can also safely assume that some sort of PCI bus access is
available - while you may have the option to build Xorg without PCI bus
support for a cell phone without PCI, you won't have the option to build
a driver for a video card that's only available in PCI flavors for that
cell phone, since it wouldn't make sense.


-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System