[Xorg] The big multiconsole nasty

[Jon Smirl]

--- Egbert Eich <eich at pdx.freedesktop.org> wrote:
>  > > What we may need is an IOCTL to set VGA routing on bridges. 
>  > 
>  > I'd sure rather see the X server not need to understand the whole
>  > PCI bus layout...
>  > 
> 
> No, from an X point if view this is entirely irrelevant. From a
> hardware driver layer this will be relevant on OSes that don't 
> handle these things thru the kernel. 
>
> I would think 85-90 percent of the users can be served well without
> it. The other 10-15 percent are users of older versions of Linux 
> and users of other less popular OSes.
>
> We can either go and tell theese to go get lost and seek support 
> elsewhere or we can add some reasonable fallback support for OSes
> that don't provide these features.
>

Or we can just push hardware support like this to an external library.
On Linux 2.6 this library will be tiny since most things are handled by
the OS. On other platforms the library may be much larger. Resetting
secondary cards is also something that should be handled externally
since X is not the only client for these.

A good place to start would be to extract the existing code from X and
convert it to a standalone library. I have tried doing this twice but
the existing code is very, very intertwined into the X server. Both
times I have given up because I got tired of fixing hundreds of
dependencies between the library and the X server.

Building this library would determine the API that is needed. Once the
API is settled we can build a Linux 2.6 version that has all of the
redundant code removed.

 

=====
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at yahoo.com


		
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