[PULL to discuss] Remove kdrive, Xnest, and Xvfb

[Julien Cristau]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 17:37:37 -0700, Jamey Sharp wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:13:46 -0700, Jeremy Huddleston <jeremyhu at apple.com> wrote:
> >> Most functionality of these servers can be provide by Xorg with either
> >> the nested or dummy video driver.
> 
> +1 for deleting these obsolete DDXes. I'd suggest deleting Xdmx as well.
> 
> > I'm all for deleting the code. I would like to have some idea of what
> > you mean by 'most' here -- is there any significant functionality which
> > isn't provided by the xf86-video drivers?
> 
> I don't have a complete list, but here are some things.
> 
> Timothy Meade thinks there may be some bugs in xf86-video-fbdev
> compared to Xfbdev, and had other complaints when I tried to remove
> Xfbdev a year ago:
> http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2011-May/022177.html
> 
> Xvfb has -fbdir and -shmem options to allocate the framebuffer in a
> mmap'd file or a shared memory segment, respectively. Surely nobody
> cares? If somebody does, patches copying the code from Xvfb to
> xf86-video-dummy should be easy to write.
> 
> Xnest has options for configuring the created window. Again, I doubt
> anyone cares, but it's easy functionality to re-introduce in
> xf86-video-nested if someone wants to.
> 
> I think Xephyr has support for some extensions that may not be
> supported when using xf86-video-nested. Perhaps Xv and DRI? Or maybe
> DRI support was in patches that never got merged, like the Xephyr XCB
> patches.
> 
Xephyr indeed supports Xv and DRI1.

> Xdmx has a complicated GLX proxy to support indirect GL spanning
> multiple ScreenRecs under Xinerama. It might be nice to find a way to
> merge that into DIX or the xfree86 DDX. Bonus points if Mesa had a
> multihead libGL that could delegate direct rendering for each
> ScreenRec to an appropriate libGL. :-)
> 
Xdmx's glxproxy has been broken for years.

> Generally, I think Xdmx may have support for some extensions that Xorg
> doesn't support when Xinerama is turned on, and it'd be nice to copy
> that over.
> 
> It might be nice to have backwards-compatibility shell scripts for the
> replaced programs that convert their command-line arguments into a
> suitable xorg.conf and then run the real server.
> 
I think that should be a requirement before deleting the code, there's
quite a few people and scripts using at least Xvfb out there.  If indeed
the dummy and nested drivers provide the functionality of those other
DDXes then that shouldn't even be hard.

Cheers,
Julien