[forum] XFree86 5.0 TODO

[Sven Luther]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 03:04:03PM +0000, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 03:21:24 +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > about being able to do dynamic changes ? The idea is to have a
> > framebuffer zone we render to (with one XAA, one DRI and so on) and one,
> > two or three independenct viewport into this. If you are not able to
> > modify these viewports dynamically, you bar the door to features like
> > screen mirroring (optionally with scaling) or windows zooming, which the
> > matrox windows driver does already for example, and which are usefull,
> > for people with sight problems or for doing presentations with a video
> > projector for example. But then, you already read my arguments on the
> > DRI mailing list, didn't you ?
>  
> Nope, I must have missed that, but it comes down to framebuffer management
> as I've already said. I think I'll contact Ian Romanick to forward his
> current document here, regarding framebuffer management though.

Yes and no, the main idea is to separate the framebuffer management
thingy (either for framebuffer memory and for offscreen pixmaps or other
succ) from the viewports. You have the framebuffer, where the graphic
core/processor renders to, and you have then one, two or more viewports
that allow you (the human looking at the screen) to look at the content
of this framebuffer, these viewports correspond to the DAC or Digital
Ports, or even Video Ports, that allow you to see the content of the
framebuffer. These viewports take a source zone (x/y position of the
framebuffer in the virtual memory + width/height) and an outgoing mode
for the monitor, flatpanel, etc.

And it is this viewport setting that does not come down to framebuffer
management, and for which i hope we can come up with a propper solution.

> > This would allow for cleaner writing of drivers. Sure many of this is
> > already possible, but in a hacky way. If we are planing about 5.0, let's
> > do this cleanly, and think about it this way.
> 
> There's undoubtably some work to be done to clean up the driver interface.

:)))

> I'm not quite sure I completely understand what your splitting out above,
> but if you can base what your thinking on the DESIGN document in
> xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/doc/DESIGN and expand to the level of
> detail that exists in this document I could make more comments.

Ok, i will try to come up with such a document, i will need some tim for
it though, and, well, i am mostly familiar only with the driver part,
not with whatever is done above the driver.

Friendly,

Sven Luther