Re: VSTa update

On Fri, Mar 10, 2000 at 04:56:11PM -0800, Andy Valencia wrote:
> [David Jeske <jeske@chat.net> writes:]
> >I looked into it a while back and thought that the kernel portion of
> >LinuxGGI would fit nicely into a VSTa server. (it basically arbitrates
> >access to the video hardware so applications don't need root/sys.sys
> >access to control the screen)
>
> The problem I had was that I couldn't find any graphics hardware support in
> it; it appeared to depend on the Linux kernel FB support. And *that* stuff
> looked pretty deeply embedded in the kernel. To the extent that svgalib
> looked much easier to adopt. Has this changed?

Now that I looked deeper at what they have, it does not seem far
enough along to be consider a "big-win" IMO.

--
Given that, however...
I don't understand what you are referring to exactly. The Linux kernel
FB support is just support for basic text modes. The biggest thing the
Linux kernel FB stuff does is provide an API for telling user-level
software to "let go" of the hardware and restore it to a known
state. That's how switching virtual consoles with X works...
The single biggest goal of GGI is to provide _one_ place where
hardware specific drivers live, in GGI. In 1998 they released a sample
implementation that had hardware support for a number of graphics
cards. They now have a new implementation based on what they learned
which unfortunatly only has dumb framebuffer support for four types of
hardware (VGA, S3 ViRGE, Matrox G200/G400, Permidia). Acceleration
support is non-existant. 
FYI: Here is a summary of where I understand code to live in GGI and
non-GGI Linux setups.
1. non-GGI    
  Text modes:      linux kernel             
  svgalib:         card-specific userspace library      
  X-windows:       card-specific xwindows executable      
2. GGI
  Text modes:   card-specific in-kernel GGI driver
  svgalib:      card-specific in-kernel GGI driver + 
                   svgalib-compatible userspace library
  X-windows:    card-specific in-kernel GGI driver + 
                   generic Xggi X server
-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske_at_chat.net