[Xorg] Re: Adding DMX to XFree86

[Kevin E Martin]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 11:30:38AM -0700, Ian Romanick wrote:
> Kevin E Martin wrote:
> 
> >I think many of us would very much like to have hardware accelerated
> >indirect rendering, and from time to time there has been talk of adding
> >it to the DRI project.  It's actually been on the "to do" list for the
> >DRI project from the original design days, but it's a large project and
> >there was little interest in funding it back when I was with PI and VA.
> >I'm still hopeful that it will eventually happen.
> 
> The current thinking is to, essentially, 'rm -rf xc/programs/Xserver/GL' 
> and re-write it so that libglx.a loads a device-dependent *_dri.so, like 
> the client-side libGL does.  The advantage being that only one driver 
> binary will be needed per-device.  The support and maintainence 
> advantages should be obvious.

Exactly.  That was the basic approach we were planning to take at PI.
FYI, there are several papers (from either HP or SGI, IIRC) that give an
overview of various the approaches.  I can try to dig up those refs, if
it would be helpful.

> Work has been started on an Xlib based DRI driver (something of a 
> contradiction in terms, I know) by Adam Jackson.  I've started writing 
> Python scripts to automatically generate GLX protocol handling code (for 
> both client-side and server-side).  We're getting closer to starting the 
> "real" work, but I need to clear a few things off my plate first.
> 
> My goal is to start a branch in the DRI tree in the next few (3 to 4) 
> months to get this work going.

That's excellent!  I look forward to seeing this effort get going.

Kevin