Hi all, ok, lets start.
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 6:08 PM, Alan Coopersmith <[email protected]> wrote: [...] > What you do there is still up to you, but to be clear, I don't expect Xsun > to be a viable long term solution, for many of the same reasons Sun chose > years ago to move to Xorg, and for additional reasons due to the release > model. [...] > Note especially that I have permission to release the source to exactly one > and only one Xsun driver right now - the cg6 that was already released from an > older source base as the Xsun reference driver source in the old DDK. All > other drivers remain closed source binaries - this means you won't be able to > fix bugs in those drivers or add features that require driver or ABI changes. Sure. But finally we will be able to use the redistributable fb- and especially Xsun-ddx- binaries _at_all_ . Whether we can fix bugs directly inside the drivers (versus just work-around them by potentially hacking around arising problems inside the open-src OXS) is a PRETTY marginal reason for being unhappy about Project Open Xsun. I think especially from the user´s point of view. Because for the very first time ever distributors (including Oracle [but they probably won´t want]) or just end-users will be able to use 3DLabs based cards (Expert 3D, Expert 3D-Lite, XVR-500, XVR-600, XVR-1200 [and XVR-2500 which is a 3DLabs Realizm but which does already have official Xorg ddx support]) plus -also for the first time - the Sun XVR-1000 {and of course additionally all other cards/chipsets} on SPARC-OpenSolaris! The subset of cards supported by the Xorg community server together with my original patches as part of our previous FOX community project had been quite limited (PGX, PGX-24, PGX32, PGX64, XVR-100, Creator, Creator 3D, Elite3D). The most significant drawback was, that only older generations of sun4u systems with bridges such as Psycho, Psycho+, Schizo or USIIe´s Hummingbird had been functioning during pre-libpciaccess times. And since the introduction of libpciaccess with xserver 1.5 (as part of Xorg 7.4) the old stuff did not function at all anymore, primarily due to the broken way in which the shipping SPARC-OpenSolaris libdevinfo and libpciaccess interact with each other (MMIO address cannot be determined, the old aperture driver add_drv´ed as pseudo-device no longer manages to map the right offsets, if installedd as pci-card attached driver, one would end up in instant kernel panics inside the virtual memory subsystem and so on etc.......) . The only old patches that were relatively easily revivable, were those related to UPA bus scanning and Xorg´s sunffb ddx with (limited, such as without RandR) support for the Creator, Creator3D, Elite3D cards. This stuff is available in the open-src FOX repo on opensolaris.org. But as long as Sun/Oracle refuses (??) to integrate it into the main x11 gate, the end-user cannot simply add my patched version of the sunffb_drv.so. They need at least a patched /usr/bin/Xorg server binary (nothing more, as long as this binary and the gate are otherwise in sync). This could be handled via offering just 2 files: /usr/bin/Xorg___foo_patched (or replace /usr/bin/Xorg with it) plus sunffb_drv.so . Maybe I should have offered something like this long ago. Sorry for this, but I always wanted to first research and solve the unknown libpciaccess related problems. Therefore I never came to anything related to all my previously announced projects :( ALLeatingBlackHoleMonster ... > Additionally, since Xsun is no longer in the base OS, the QA groups no longer > test against it, and the higher level desktop software is increasingly > depending > on Xorg features not found in Xsun, like the Render and RandR extensions. > (Well, Xsun has an old version of Render in the core code, but most Xsun > drivers > don't provide the required pixmap depths to support it, so it's disabled.) True true true. But judging from the messages and feature-requests we got on this alias over the years (or on opensolaris-discuss and indiana-discuss) we have seen, that most users just want to have _whatever_ form of X11 running on their currently unsupported configs (primarily the still pretty widespread XVR-500 and XVR-600 on the more recent workstaions, most of all SB1500, SB2500). Be it without hardware acceleration or even just in sluggish framebuffer mode! So this OXS project will more than just please them, I am convinced! > I see this as a stopgap for now for those who just need a basic display on old > hardware, and don't mind these limitations - whether someone picks it up and > develops something more is up to people like you and the other community > members. Ah, right. Just what I wrote 10 lines above. I also think so, as most others here probably do. > One of my other motivations in doing this is that it also means that there > will be a lot more people who can look at the Xsun sources to see if there's > bug fixes or enhancements to port to Xorg (like the Sun Shared Memory > Transport > I've had way down on the todo list for years). This sounds like a good extension to the base objective. Very valuable. > -- > -Alan Coopersmith- [email protected] > Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System Thanks again! -- %martin bochnig _______________________________________________ xwin-discuss mailing list [email protected] List info: http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/xwin-discuss Unsubscribe: http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/options/xwin-discuss
