[Xorg] The big multiconsole nasty

[Jon Smirl]

--- Egbert Eich <eich at pdx.freedesktop.org> wrote:
> We could probalby stick a large amount of this into the kernel and
> make 85 to 90 percent of the users happy. 
> The reason why I don't advocate this but instead suggest to try to do
> as
> much as possible from user land is that I don't want to make the
> other
> 10 to 15 percent unhappy by giving them the finger.
> Furthermore it seems to be much harder to port things between kernels
> of different OSes than to port a userland application to the
> interfaces
> of a new kernel.

But now we end up building everything twice on Linux since fbdev needs
all of these things too. Then we have to spend time making the X and
fbdev versions play nice together. Plus, X's PCI bus manipulations are
in direct conflict with the Linux kernel.

Why not build an external library that adds these features to the OS's
that don't have them and uses the OS routines when available. This
library would be small on Linux and big on BSD. The library interface X
uses would be the same on both OS's. Mesa-solo needs this same library.

Another example of this is sorting out where hotplug input devices go
in a multiuser system. Linux is going to have to do this at the
kernel/library level in order to support framebuffer console. This code
can easily sort these things out for X too. But if X builds a system
for this too then we have to make everything coordinate and use the
same config files, etc.

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


	
		
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