Bug#185450: Xfree86 and console server (and VT_ACTIVATE, etc)

[Robert Millan]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 04:24:17PM +0200, Gaël Le Mignot wrote:
>  > My idea was to implement the driver in userspace and force X to use it.
>  > Following this dessign, we could end up seeing X running as non-root.
> 
> That would require a huge amount of work I fear, especially if we want
> to support hardware acceleration at  the end (like xvideo or dri), but
> I agree it's the best long-term solution.

Yes. But note the hardware acceleration concept is a dirty hack as a whole.
It'd be nice to support it since this is the direction the world takes,
but not critical. I can live happily with a screen that is simply a matrix
of pixels.

>  > What we could do is writing the keyboard, vga etc translators, but don't
>  > implement the actual hardware I/O on them yet. Instead, just use them for
>  > resource management.
> 
> I was thinking  about something like that too, at  least until we move
> to L4 (implementing user-space drivers on top of Mach is tricky).

I started the "user-drivers" project at Savannah some time ago, and
started writing simple drivers from scratch.

At this point, I think it'd be better to use Oskit instead. To the people
who have played with Oskit already, do you think it's viable to use it
as a backend for userspace drivers?

-- 
Robert Millan