cfb conversion effort (was Re: Debugging X.org drivers?)

[Andy Ritger]

On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, Adam Jackson wrote:

> On Monday 01 November 2004 02:15, Roland Mainz wrote:
> > Erm... that will be a _huge_ problem as all the print DDX override the
> > GC handing (the fully-vector based DDXs like Postscript and SVGprint
> > should not be a problem... but all the PCL drivers are some kind of
> > crossbreed between bitmap and vector DDX).
> 
> I admit to being out of my depth on this subject.  All I know is, when I did 
> the sunleo conversion, the GCOps hackery didn't want to compile, so I dropped 
> it on the assumption that it would not affect correctness.  Your drivers may 
> be different.
> 
> As an aside, I assume this means the print DDXs don't support Render, correct?
> 
> Where do those DDXes even live?  I don't see them under programs/Xserver/hw.
> 
> > > There's an experimental patch to convert sunleo to fb:
> > > http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1259
> > > which I have received no feedback on as of yet, and I don't have the
> > > hardware to verify it.
> >
> > Did you ask some of the Sun people yet ? They should have the matching
> > hardware... :)
> 
> Not directly.  I'm under the impression that sunleo and sunffb aren't really 
> considered interesting anymore.  I'd love to be corrected.
> 
> > > The final step would be converting our overlay support to use fb.  I
> > > don't even know where to begin here, largely for lack of hardware.  I see
> > > a couple of functions in the fb layer that look like they're intended for
> > > overlay support.  I've been tempted to just drop our overlay support
> > > altogether to see who complains; my guess is, roughly, nobody.
> >
> > Uhm... I would complain. LOUDLY. :)
> 
> "Our overlay support" here means "the cfb-based xf8_16bpp, xf8_32bpp and 
> xf8_32wid modules in the xfree86 DDX".  I'm not talking about ripping all 
> overlay support code out of X.  My world view is rather limited to using X to 
> put pixels on screens on hardware that people actually have, so I apologize 
> for using words like "our" without defining "us" first. ;)
> 
> I can count the in-tree drivers that use this support on one hand: chips, mga, 
> glint, sunffb.  That's not exactly a sweeping majority.

FWIW, the NVIDIA driver uses the X overlay code on all Quadro parts.
The CI/RGB overlay on these parts are used by many workstation users
for applications such as Maya.  That said, the NVIDIA X driver uses
the mi overlay support, and not the xf8_* modules mentioned above.

Thanks,
- Andy

> - ajax
>