--- Alan Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
s/OpenGL/Some drawing library/ - providing its using the kernel interfaces we don't care what. (eg the bogl console driver is very small, the opengl one would probably be rather larger and nicer)
I wasn't thinking that the kernel interface was standardized. For example DRM has some common IOCTLs and then hundreds of per chipset ones. There is no standard bitblt or draw char IOCTL.
IMO, this is a long standing problem with the DRM. The main issue is that there's only one version number associated with each DRM module. What's needed is a device independent version and a device dependent version. In a sense, it needs something like an extension mechanism. Right now, some drivers support a vblank wait ioctl and some don't. The ones that do support it, support it the same way.
If we could extend the DRM API in a device independent manner, we could solve some of this. When I thought about this in the past, I came up with two ways to do it.
1. Add a device independent version. Device independent code could be written that would test the version number the same way device dependent code does today. The drawback is that in order to advertise version X.N functionality, you also have to adverteise version [1.1, 1.N-1] functionality. Some hardware / drivers may not want to / be able to do that.
2. Add an "extension" query ioctl. Give each piece of functionality (i.e., all the related vblank functions) a unique number. Drivers would make a query like, "Is extension 5 supported?" If that ioctl returns true, then the driver could use that functionality. The disadvantage of this method is that it increases the number of ioctl calls that need to be made. Since the set of supported extensions can be tracked in the DRM with a bit string, the additional code size should be trivial.
Thoughts?
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