Well, X11 protocol was designed rather well.
kind of overkill for this purpose, not? A command set that allows using the opcodes easily to jump directly into the verification function table and if the request is allowed into the function table that contains the i/o programming routines might get coded pretty compactly.
AFAIK X11 protocol is very efficient at what it does. The overhead comes from other parts - like fonts, etc which we will not care about anyway.
If one looks at the actual packets being sent back and force it should be pretty much what we are talking about here - modulo the fine technical points we have not started discussing yet :)
We can simplify the matters quite a bit by requiring that writes to the fd always send N whole packets (and don't break on per-packet boundaries).
On the other hand we would probably want to modify the protocol at least in the following way:
1) take into account modern hardware.. no short width anymore, more pixel formats.
The pixel format is a source or destination surface format flag, there should be no need to encode it in rendering commands, only in surface creation/allocation commands.
The reason I am talking about pixel format is that I was advocating having
drawing and mode setting commands being separate and completely orthogonal to memory management.
This way memory management code can be completely generic and the card should only tell it about different zones (i.e. here is where you can have framebuffer, here is where you can have cursor, here is AGP space, etc)
1) implies that we are not going to be binary compatible with usual X11 protocol, so we are implementing a new protocol nevertheless which means this whole point rather academic: if one designs a new protocol there is no reason not to take into account design of X11.
(a full fledged X11 implementation in the kernel might have some problems to get accepted by the lkml codingstyle policemen;)
It does not have to be all in the kernel.
best
Vladimir Dergachev
Holger
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