On Tue, Oct 31, 2000 at 07:52:14PM -0600, Nelson Rush wrote:
> Speaking of X Windows, here is an interesting idea...
>
> Instead of trying to map the video card to the guest operating system or
> hack at it some other way you could just run X Windows and xhost the
> localhost on the guest. Install an X server on the host operating system and
> then you trap the guest X Window messages over a loopback and display it on
> the host. Surely this would be a better method, and much faster. So, to run
> MS Windows as the guest you'd need to install an X server on it. Maybe that
> defeats the purpose, I don't know. But, IMHO Plex86 shouldn't have to worry
> about the video card. Of course, there is also VNC which is based off of the
> X Windows protocol and I think it gets better mileage.
>
> http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
>
> If you're going to decide to map the video card memory instead, there is
> going to be very noticeable latency. And as you pointed out there are
> disadvantages to virtualizing the VGA access.
VNC and X Windows are indeed good ideas for optimized video access
(though AFAIK SDL has more hardware-acceleration support), but the user
will (probably) want to see things that go on before the special driver
is loaded. Think about how VMWare does it. Video _always_ works; the VMWare
special display drivers just make it faster by direct pipes similar to
what you describe.
Speaking of VMWare, has anyone realized that all the kernel-level code
for VMWare is (and has to be) open-source? And it's quite well documented
internally, also ... could any of the real hackers here get ideas from
that code?
[snip quoted message]
--
Kenneth Arnold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> / kcarnold / Linux user #180115
http://arnoldnet.net/~kcarnold/
