[Xorg] DRI merging

[Alan Cox]

On Sul, 2004-06-13 at 20:47, Matt Sealey wrote:
> Linux basically falls behind on two simple fronts at the moment:
> it has no "simple" 2D or 3D framework capable of much more than

I deal with embedded Linux people on a daily basis. I think they would
disagree. For 2D it has several in heavy use
	-	Keith's tiny X server work
	-	Nanogui (2D down to about 50K RAM)
	-	DirectFB (particularly strong at multimedia)

For 3D you end up looking back at the mesa-solo work and it shares that
same interest with the X over mesa people.

> We need a low-level "kernel" graphics API (much like Windows

Unfortunately for a lot of hardware the entire design is different per
card. You have to deal with an incredible range of hardware and its a
tribute to the X DDX and XAA design how well it has coped with this.

I've dealt with very little that X couldn't take a good shot at handling
well. YUV422 only framebuffers being the one that gave it serious
hiccups.

Secondly every line of code you put in the kernel has to be audited,
analysed and can introduce security holes or crash the machine. Its
harder to debug and its harder to write in the first place. There are
very good reasons (see the original DRI paper) for putting as much as
you can in user space. The Mesa X work also tries to keep as much as
possible in user space - including designs for mode computation by
kernel->user callback.