It is a fact that Microsoft Longhorn and the Mac GUI are moving towards 3D hardware for their base GUI. It is also a fact that it will take a lot of effort and probably several years to move X in the same direction. Personally I don't want to see Linux in the position of having the new 3D effects in Windows and the Mac and not being able to respond. I'm willing to put some time and effort into this and maybe other are too.
I don't buy the "support old hardware" argument for stopping the forward progress of DRI. With that argument we'd still all be running in X86 real mode and the Athlon-64 would be pointless. Backwards compatibility is important and fallbacks should be provided, but it's not a reason for stopping the use of new hardware features. So what is the best design for achieving this? The project has to have DRI at it's core since it's the only choice for 3D acceleration on Linux. We also have to preserve X Windows compatibility for all of the existing apps. My first thought would be to get DRI running standalone (like the fbdri project but sync'd to CVS) then modify X to load on top of the standalone DRI. After that works rework the 2D X driver to use the DRI API instead of using the hardware directly. The reasoning behind a standalone DRI is to make it easier to build a 3D windowing system. To create a 3D windowing system a mechanism is needed to get existing X windows into textures so that they can be transformed. If it proves too hard to alter X, standalone DRI would allow X to be replaced with something like NanoX. Another solution would be to leave everything as is. Then 3D enable the root window and start hacking on the existing X windowing system. ===== Jon Smirl [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
