Re: XF86 and full-screen graphical console apps

[Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com>]

Johnny Taporg wrote:

> I'm betting that you're right.  I read something
> somewhere that one of the features of the upcoming
> (or recent?) xf86 release was a modular structure,
> where a single server sits on video drivers for each
> of the different chipsets.

I read somewhere on the XF86 site about a "libxf86" or something
similar...

> >From that, we can infer that up to now, the xf86 code
> was less organized, and splitting out the display
> parts would have been difficult.

I think you can still get XFree86 as a patch to the X Consortium
sources, so that tells a lot of what state could the code be... Ouch!

> Additionally, although people might find the
> display code useful, I could understand the xf86 dev
> team being hesitant to make it an "official" lib.  If
> they did, they'd be responsible for maintaining the
> API and ensuring backwards compatibility, which is
> a restriction that they may not want to deal with.

If they make that a single X server that loads the right module, they'll
have to standardize the exposed API of those module for themselves, so
we might be able to do something with this... We'll see I guess...

> On the other hand... maybe it's worth asking about
> on their mailing list?

Maybe it would be. Is anybody on their mailing list?

> Of course, just like svgalib, since it's not in the
> kernel, you'll either have to be root to use it,
> unless you make use of some kind of memory visuals.

Yes, of course, but unlike svgalib, you'd have hundreds of well tested
drivers, a lot accelerated and some having full acceleration. You'd have
an input module that works correctly (when I quit X, my keyboard is
fine, which is not always the case with SVGALib, also console switching
works better for X than SVGALib) and that supports multiple input
devices (mouse, keyboard, joystick, wacom tablets and maybe others).

You'd also have the whole thing configured from the start by
install-time Xconfigurators and the likes. I find it quite stupid to
have to configure my video card twice, my mouse twice, and so on,
between XF86Config and libvga.config. The Red Hat Xconfigurator probes
PCI video cards automatically and is quite good at its thing.

-- 
Pierre Phaneuf
Ludus Design, http://ludusdesign.com/