[forum] XFree86 5.0 TODO

[Alan Hourihane]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 12:48:12 +0000, Keith Whitwell wrote:
> >
> >>Anyway, for dual/multi-head on single graphic cards that support it, i
> >>would like to have us separate more the part related to the graphic chip
> >>from the part related to the output heads. Current multi-headed
> >>solutions (on the same chip) use a chip sharing trick, and the pEnt to
> >>store common information, but we could make this more formal, at least
> >>at the device driver level, and have things like preinit and part of the
> >>screeninit be done one time only for the entity, and then have multiple
> >>calls to modeinit for setting the viewports, the zooming, the
> >>outgoing resolution, the ddc info on the attached monitor and so on done
> >>per head.
> >
> >
> >multihead on a common framebuffer is obviously chip specific, so a lot
> >of the details are specific to a driver. Again, for this, it should be
> >doable now.
> 
> Alan - do you mean that there is some shared infrastructure there now for 
> this, or that individual drivers can each extend what exists to get this 
> going?
 
Both. The mga driver is a good example of using a second crt. But also
XAA has specific changes to share a graphics accelerator. There is also
some helper code in xfree86/common that can detect when your using a shared
entity.

Additionally the overlay code xf8_16bpp actually sets up an 8bpp and a
16bpp framebuffer, and if the chip supports it, it does the overlay so
you can use both simultaneously. I believe the chips driver does support this
mode of operation.

> There was once talk about a multithreaded X server - is this envisaged for 
> XF5?

There's not been talk of a multithreaded Xserver for 5.0, or for quite
some time. Although there was some work quite some time ago to investigate
this....

That was called MTXserver and the code is still available from the XFree86
CVS, but MTXserver is extremely old. It's under xc/workInProgress/MTXserver
if you want to take a closer look.

> What is the future of the work & extensions keithp was particularly 
> involved with?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Alan.