From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from cthulhu.engr.sgi.com (cthulhu.engr.sgi.com [192.26.80.2]) by neteng.engr.sgi.com (980427.SGI.8.8.8/970903.SGI.AUTOCF) via ESMTP id MAA67933 for ; Tue, 13 Apr 1999 12:25:58 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: Received: (from majordomo-owner@localhost) by cthulhu.engr.sgi.com (980427.SGI.8.8.8/970903.SGI.AUTOCF) id MAA73210 for linux-list; Tue, 13 Apr 1999 12:23:54 -0700 (PDT) mail_from (owner-linux@relay.engr.sgi.com) Received: from sgi.com (sgi.engr.sgi.com [192.26.80.37]) by cthulhu.engr.sgi.com (980427.SGI.8.8.8/970903.SGI.AUTOCF) via ESMTP id MAA37366 for ; Tue, 13 Apr 1999 12:23:47 -0700 (PDT) mail_from (ulfc@bun.falkenberg.se) Received: from bun.falkenberg.se (dialup89-6-10.swipnet.se [130.244.89.90]) by sgi.com (980327.SGI.8.8.8-aspam/980304.SGI-aspam: SGI does not authorize the use of its proprietary systems or networks for unsolicited or bulk email from the Internet.) via ESMTP id MAA07177 for ; Tue, 13 Apr 1999 12:23:45 -0700 (PDT) mail_from (ulfc@bun.falkenberg.se) Received: (from ulfc@localhost) by bun.falkenberg.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) id VAA26056; Tue, 13 Apr 1999 21:23:14 +0200 Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 21:23:13 +0200 From: Ulf Carlsson To: Alan Cox Cc: Andrew Isaacson , linux@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com Subject: Re: Resources in X11 port Message-ID: <19990413212313.A26025@bun.falkenberg.se> Mail-Followup-To: Alan Cox , Andrew Isaacson , linux@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com References: <19990413125254.A20170@mtu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.4i In-Reply-To: ; from Alan Cox on Tue, Apr 13, 1999 at 08:10:52PM +0100 Sender: owner-linux@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com Precedence: bulk On Tue, Apr 13, 1999 at 08:10:52PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > If you (the porters) are willing to wait until June to have publicly > > distributable code, you should develop for the 4.0 branch rather than > > the 3.3 branch. There are a lot of useful new features in the new > > code base, and the new design is quite a bit easier to code for than > > the old. > > Actually I wonder if it will be. I got an email from the X team today which told me that pulic release date for a beta snapshot of 4.0 still is set to June. > Not having seen the code because of the silly XFree about beta releases its > hard to be sure. The X folks I talked to all pointed me at the 8514 driver - > which is very similar in many ways to the SGI cards - both are designed for > X11, both have no direct frame buffer access and they have fairly similar > concepts. That 8514 driver is certainly a good driver to look at while writing a driver for the SGI cards, but it's generally a bad idea to just rip the code off. I have at least not had much luck doing success hacks. The 8514 driver is also a quite old driver and it's not using the new interfaces in for Xserver. > I would urge btw that anyone working on an XFree SGI driver releases it under > a license like the NPL so that the XFree people can't hide it in a locked away > beta release in future. The copyright still remains to the person who wrote the code, and even if the code is locked away in a beta release, it's possible for the writer himself to make his own code public (i think). - Ulf