Re: In-kernel graphics subsystem

[Dave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com>]

>
> We are a group of three undergrad CS students, almost ready to start our senior project. We have this idea of integrating a graphics subsystem with the kernel and doing away with the X server. We are not really sure if this is a wise thing to do. It hasn't been done before. Your comments on this idea will be very helpful.
>
>

This isn't a good idea, the whole idea of dumping the X server has
been done to death, you might notice we still have an X server... as
mentioned fbui and also DirectFB does a lot of things (not all
in-kernel....)

What might be an interesting side project that is fairly self
contained would be a userspace console with full support for
international languages and Unicode/UTF-8 rendering, using
freetype/xft code. Jon Smirl suggests this in his
http://www.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html paper and I've
thought it would be an interesting idea to implement at some point,

You could sit it on top of OpenGL or directly on the drm/fbdev layers
(probably a bit harder) an OpenGL rendered console would be a good
enough start I suppose...

Dave.