cirrus_laguna.o vs cirrus_laguna_drv.o (was: Re: User problems with the DLLoader)

[Egbert Eich]

Alex Deucher writes:
 > 
 > That expalins why we have "ati" as a wrapper for r128, radeon, and
 > atimisc.  I wonder why that wasn't enforced on S3 (wrapping s3, virge,
 > and savage).  That might also explain the riva module.
 > 

For the user it is way easier to have one single name to use.
The user may know that he has a cirrus chipset - he may not
know if this is a 'laguna' or an 'alpine'.
With ATi is seems to be different. ATi has publicised its
chipset generation names much more.
Well and S3 is an altogether different story: The S3 driver did
not exist when XFree86 V4 was released. It was backported from
3.x later. Appearantly at that time nobody really cared too
much any more...
Generally, for PCI cards - and today there is hardly anything else -
we may be able to create a fully generic driver loading module that 
would be able to load any driver that is required. Then we don't 
have to deal with these individual driver wrappers any more.

Egbert.