Elektrified X.org released (was: X configuration paradigm, and a proposal)

[Jim Gettys]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 15:52 -0500, Alex Deucher wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:44:08 +0000, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
> > On Maw, 2004-11-30 at 18:23, Jim Gettys wrote:
> > > David,
> > >
> > > I agree with you and Kristian and I have started work, specifically on
> > > the input system side to do exactly what you suggest.  Similar
> > > work ought to be done someday for the screens themselves (hotplug being
> > > a reality even for screens; today with PCMCIA and PCI express is just
> > > beginning to ship).
> > 
> > Mobility Electronics have been shipping cardbus hotplug video for about
> > 5 or 6 years now (E1000V). They make fun toys for this sort of testing
> > and are cheap on ebay generally 8)
> > 
> > 
> 
> For that matter, AGP and even PCI video cards have been able to change
> resolution, colordepth, type and number of outputs, etc. on the fly
> for even longer.
> 

Resolution we now can handle using randr.

Depth has been a real problem: we believe it would break most existing
applications (particularly Xt or Motif applications, if we had tried to
do it the way we first envisioned in randr, and then backed away from.

But composite makes depth switching easy: the applications don't have
their depth changed out from under them, and only the compositing
manager has to do anything.  So we should be able to handle this pretty
well once composite is the "normal" way most people use X.

We have lots of work to do for handling outputs and for mode setting in
general.  But this should be (mostly) something that most applications
don't have to care about.
				- Jim