> "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> said:
>
> [...]
>
> > Speaking for myself, I'd much rather upgrade the kernel.
> > XFree86 comes with a collection of libraries, and a library
> > upgrade often breaks stuff. The kernel is easy to change.
>
> Because it doesn't depend on the year's crop on video cards. Put that stuff
> into the kernel, it will be _much_ worse than upgrading a library.
First off you can upgrade just the Xserver itself with Xfree.. I've been
doing it for along time. :) I was running an 3.3.2 server with like 3.1
libs.. Worked fine.
Not should break when you upgrade anything if the interfaces are well
designed and stuck to. No matter if it's the kernel or userspace. I dont
think the kernel should include with it (in the .bz2) any more video code
then nessassary to boot to a text console on 99% of the hardware out
there..
There should hooks so that outside video driver code can be loaded and
work file. This is where the accelerated drivers come from.
There also need to be a group to create drivers and approve of binary only
ones. The natural group is the kgi people because they are already doing
it.
So if a video card maker wants an accelerated driver for Linux they can do
four things:
1) Release specs and let the community create the driver.
2) Pay someone to make a driver under the GPL.
3) Create their own and release it under the GPL.
4) Create their own and keep it under NDA.
The video driver people would review code for stability and approve it.
Smart Linux users will only use approved drivers.
If the card company wants approvial they would need to release the code to
the video driver people under NDA and pay a fee to have it reviewed (the
fee only appiles to NDAed drivers and would perhaps make them think twice
about keeping the specs secret)..
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