Frank Middleton wrote:
> This is my understanding of the issues
Frank just reminded me I hadn't confirmed this list was correct - it's
close, but not quite.
> o The package of proprietary drivers for the legacy frame buffer
> hardware will install on Open Solaris, but they won't work
> because the PCI scanning software isn't compatible.
If you're referring to:
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/downloads/sparc_graphics
The kernel drivers should work fine. They won't do anything really
useful though because they only include X server modules for the Xsun
server, not Xorg, and the two X servers use different interfaces for
their loadable driver modules for hardware.
The only "PCI scanning software" issue I know of is the issues between
the Xorg server we do ship, and the Xorg open source modules that Martin
ported from other OS'es for hardware we don't ship drivers for.
> o Xorg won't work with the legacy drivers.
Because they don't include any Xorg driver modules.
> o XSun will work with the legacy drivers, but it needs to be
> Open Sourced or installed from old SVR4 packages. Open
> Sourcing it can't even begin until this project starts, and
> even when it is, it will be low priority and hence could take
> a long time. Once available, it will take considerable effort
> to get it to build in the Open Solaris environment.
Technically, I could throw a tarball up on the website without a project,
and claim I'm done, leaving any further action up to the community to run
with. Setting up a project is required to get an hg source code repository
setup on opensolaris.org - you could find some other place to host one instead,
github, sourceforge, google code, genunix, etc. - I just chose that as a
simple task to show that there was enough interest that I wasn't wasting
my time to do the code scrub and produce a tarball no one would ever use.
I'm open to discussion of alternatives if you want, though I only have
permission to release code to opensolaris.org, so if you chose some other
site, I'd push the tarball to opensolaris, and you'd take it from there
and put it into whatever site you wanted.
> o In theory but probably not in practise, XSun could track
> Xorg in features but realistically it won't happen, for
> example, RandR.
In theory the server could add those features, but I don't think you
could get any usable RandR support without modifying the drivers to
handle the requests to change resolution/modes on the fly, and that
will be quite difficult without the sources for the drivers, which
you won't get.
> o There may be some features in XSun that might be useful
> in Xorg
True.
> that's the main reason for Sun/Oracle's interest.
Not really - Sun/Oracle has no official interest here. Management isn't
stopping me from doing it, but it's not on my official task list that they
expect me to complete.
My main interest is in getting fewer people whining at me that I'm not
letting their 2010 OS run on their 2001 hardware (not that it was ever up to
me, I'm just the messenger). I could also achieve that by just unsubscribing
from a ton of opensolaris.org mailing lists though...
--
-Alan Coopersmith- [email protected]
Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System
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