[Xorg] The big multiconsole nasty

[Keith Packard]

Around 16 o'clock on Jun 29, Alan Cox wrote:

> 1. Multiple video cards means making RAC work across *multiple* X
> servers running at once on a system each with its own console

A significant amount of the RAC effort involves sharing the standard VGA 
I/O port and video memory addresses; if we accept that supporting multiple ISA
video cards isn't along the critical path, we can probably delay a large 
portion of this work and focus only on getting cards POSTed at boot time.

> 3. Borrowing things like BIOS mode switch functionality is going to
> get really hairy.

But may well be necessary for the forseeable future -- Intel has no 
current plan to document the i810 (et al) mode selection code, so we're 
stuck with using the BIOS.

Seems like we need some level of kernel arbitration to keep the system
stable; it could be as little as some PCI remapping ioctls and a little 
lock for shared regions.

-keith


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