Re: Getting X on Linux/SGI (2)

[offer@sgi.com (richard offer)]

* $ from knobi@munich.sgi.com at "18-Jun:10:21am" | sed "1,$s/^/* /"
*
*
* [also changeing the subject]
*
* Larry McVoy wrote:
* >
* > : There are some very serious issues which come up even getting
* > : Xfree to a moderate level of acceleration.
* >
* > How about to a simple level of working?  Without any acceleration?
* > For most people, just having xterms and netscape working is enough.
* >
* > I'm not a graphics or X person.  Could someone who knows SGI's gfx
* > devices tell us how hard it would be to make the basics work?
* >
*
*   Probably not that hard if we gave away the documentation
* (do we have *documentation*) on the GFX cards low level interfaces.
* The major problem to me seems that each different architecture
* (XL, XZ/Elan/Extreme, IMPACT, CRM) has different interfaces.
* I am not sure that you can find a minimal subset of calls
* to make a very simple Xserver work (is Peter Daifuku on this
* list ? Mark Kilgard?).

I'm fairly sure Peter isn't, and I haven't heard anything from Mark, so one
would guess not :-)

*
*   Personally I think that we don't loose anything if we give away
* the stuff for the older boards (Newport, Express).

Unfortunetly we don't get to make these sorts of decisions :-(

* I am not
* sure, what we loose if we do the same for IMPACT/IR (OK, IR
* is probably not such a big deal :-)
*
*
*  Questions:
*
* - How much HW dependent stuff is in Xsgi itself?
* - Which of the DSOs in /usr/lib/X11/dyDDX are minimally
*   needed to bring up an non-GLX Xserver?

My guess would be none of them, on my system all I have is glx, speedo, type1
and xdps, all features of which I could live without---whether the server will
work without them is another thing. Although I hope it would, as there is no
way we can have xdps.


* - How much efforts would it cost to compile the dyDDX
*   stuff for Linux and distribute the binaries only
*   (assuming that there is not to much HW stuff in Xsgi itself)?

I can't answer any of these, this requires someone else from Peter's group
(jessb and corriero are the low-level hardware type people). I doubt if they
have much interest/bandwidth.

*
*
*  And of course, we probably have to provide the microcode and
* loader for the different GFX cards.
*
*  I definitely agree with Ariel, that this is the most important
* topic once we have Linux running stable.

Good, so we are all agreed then.

*
* Martin
* --
* +---------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
* |Martin Knoblauch                 | Silicon Graphics GmbH             |
* |Manager Technical Marketing      | Am Hochacker 3 - Technopark       |
* |Silicon Graphics Computer Systems| D-85630 Grasbrunn-Neukeferloh, FRG|
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* |http://reality.sgi.com/knobi     | Fax:   (+int) 89 46107-179        |
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* |e-mail: <knobi@munich.sgi.com>   | VM: 6-333-8197 | M/S: IDE-3150    |
* +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
*

richard.

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