On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 05:20:41PM +0100, Luc Verhaegen wrote: > On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 06:06:47PM +0200, Tiago Vignatti wrote: > > On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 01:45:57AM +0100, ext Luc Verhaegen wrote: > > > > > > But the main point of this mail was ignored. Why did existing xorg pci > > > infrastructure have to be reinvented like that instead of adding a new > > > backend and fixing up the bad patches? Why did RAC get thrown away like > > > that? Why does this NIH have to keep on repeating itself? > > > > > > > The main reason is because we were needing a PCI resource broker for the > > entire system and not for one process only. And X was touching the PCI > > resources directly with RAC.. oops! We don't need and our 21st century's > > kernels do it pretty well for us :) > > > > You're talking RAC backend here. Once the RAC was initialised to know > what resources this hardware needed, it handled everything for the > driver without having to care for anything. This for memory, io and vga > (a subclass of io). > > What i see now is that _everything_ got reinvented, instead of having > written up a backend for a modern operating system, and maybe adjusting > initialisation on the driver level (as part of this info really can be > retrieved from the os now). > > Re-inventing everything is exactly the criticism that libpciaccess got, > apart from it having not been tested on any worthwhile subset of > hardware. Yet people still seem unable or unwilling to learn from their > mistakes. >
PCI code was removed (well, it's being) from X and needed be put somewhere. libpciaccess was the name of the place. I can imagine how tied and coupled such code was with the rest of the server and it was more easy to just reimplement some parts. So, it was a decision that someone made. But the removal of PCI from X was not all the problem; there was also RAC which, as I said to you, should be visible from other apps. Given, recently kernels are already doing a lot of RAC's job, we decided to just call another name - VGA arbiter - and implement only the necessary parts. I don't see why you're complaining so much... Tiago _______________________________________________ xorg-devel mailing list xorg-devel@lists.x.org http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel