[not this again!]
> On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, Boris Tobotras wrote:
>
>> GGI Project Unhappy On Linux!
> I'm not crying about that...
You will be, because of the "Windows 98" video cards that don't
have standard text mode support. I'm serious about that. The free
text console is going to be gone in a few years. Then what?
Would you like to see boot messages?
> Hmm.... I'm sorry, but I have faced that kind of attitude from the
> GGI people that would scare off even the most offence-proof people.
> When I suggested (in a private talk - no names) that I write a driver
> for a) the Trident cards and b) a VESA 2.x interface I heard what follows:
>
> a) Tridents are SHIT! Nobody uses them and who does, either simply cannot
> afford a better card or doesn't know what are graphics cards for.
> Well, no comments...
Fine, you cannot afford a decent card. That is OK.
> b) VESA is a DOS-only thing and WE (i.e. THEM) don't need it.
On most cards, VESA is provided by a DOS TSR. Do you really
want to put DOSEMU in the kernel?
> c) They have their own programmers and the DON'T NEED anyone else
If you insisted on VESA, I understand that.
> read the docs in the more recent SVGAlib dists...
That is a personal issue.
> The latest X servers don't run suid root anymore and I'm personally
> working on a library that won't run suid root as well.
If you have video card access, you can DMA right into kernel memory.
> I suppose that games are not on the list of the top 10 priorities
> of the Linux people in the world.
a. Yes they are.
b. Somebody might want to use display postscript without X.
>> SVGAlib sucks. It was great while it lasted, but its card support
>> and model does not move well across platform.
>
> That's just because there's no real maintaier for it.
SVGAlib will never do DMA.
> It will. GGI tries to be everything for everyone - and that IS a
> bloat. I like the general idea of GGI, but that's it. The philosophy
> behind it is sick. I don't want to sound hostile, but isn't such a
> monopolistic approach what makes Winblowz such a piece of crap?
Nope, it is the Microsoft priorities which are determined by marketing
and the developers that only work for money.
> All we need in the kernel is an interface to a) set video modes
> b) manage the memory mapping issues and c) handle VC management
> on behalf of the applications - all that in the hw-indep manner,
> of course. And GGI goes WAY beyond it - and that's a bloat.
You don't understand PC video hardware very well if you really think
that you can set a video mode without a full video driver. It would
work on a few cards, but not most. Maybe the Matrox Millennium is OK.
> And, if time permits, I'll try to start a project of my own that
> implements a simple and efficient interface - just the elements
> we need, nothing else.
That is what GGI does. If you simplify it any more, you have to open
up huge security holes or restrict yourself to dumb framebuffer access.
> Is graphics all that counts in the world? Linux wins on all the
> other fields - speed, security, efficiency, hardware support,
**groan**
We have an X server that disables interrupts. That should make
you scream. (hints: user-space, swapping, SMP...)
>> The GGI guys are porting to BSD. But IMHO, Linux would bring the
>> technology more to the front. The BSD developers have shows more
>> interest than the Linux developers, and, it seems to me that this
>> is a strange reversal of behaviour. I remember a time when Linux
>> was considered more "open" to core development than BSD.
Me too. :-(
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