Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 04:59:30 +0100 (CET) From: "=?iso-8859-1?q?Pedro=20F.=20Giffuni?=" <giffunip@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Project status Message-ID: <20030205035930.45235.qmail@web13404.mail.yahoo.com>
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This particular thread seems relevant for a repost... Well, I sent the following posting to NetBSD kernel's list because one of their kernel guys asked me to. As a short summary some of us want o turn FreeBSD into a decent desktop by providing high quality graphics support in the kernel. Although we are not talking about vaporware and we expect to have something working for the 5.x series, this will probably be 6.0 material (if all goes well). We need more people involved! ____________ Hi gang; Someone suggested me to write something about KGI to this list. I'm not very used to NetBSD or kernel hacking in general, so my description will be deliberately not very technical. 1) How this started. The GGI project was born on Linux with the idea of generating a complete graphic system for multiuser unix-like systems. There were also security concerns with the way XWindows and svgalib addressed memory. The Berlin consortium and GGI were born at the same time. The initial release was under the GPL to gain acceptance of the linux crowd but after a flamewar Linus killed this attempt. The old version of GGI continued living for somewhile in the form of KGICon (a set of graphic drivers) and EVStack (a terminal emulator). I don't know much more on this stage since the license was not acceptable for FreeBSD. 2) The redesign. For convinience, GGI moved to an X11 style license and got split into two projects: Kernel Graphics Interface (http://kgi.sourcefourge.net/) and GGI (only a graphics library). Both projects had a period of slow development but with a lot of design being made. Steffen Seeger, the KGI project leader, designed a complete driver structure, with some influence from project UDI (http://www.project-udi.org/). KGI is in principle platform independent, and permits the building of graphics driver using building blocks with chipsets. A driver from one platform should work on a different platform just be recompiling it (we are about to prove that in FreeBSD). Steffen also spend some time studying how X does things and he has a prototype called PhoeniX where KGI is the base system. Performance is expected to be similar to that of native X. 3) FreeBSD's rationale Since XFree86 4.x has been producing multiplatform modules and we have always considered itīs better to have multiplatform userland drivers than to have uniplatform kernel drivers. Many graphic card developers have complained about userland drivers though and sooner or later there might be a tendency to do that in kernel. There are other tendencies that make kernel support for graphics very desirable. Some developers have recognized that Linux has failed in the desktop market precisely do to it's unfriendliness and lack of graphic support. Many platforms have by default graphic support and new platforms are planned that might not have a text console. 4) The current state. For some months Nicholas Souchu from FreeBSD has been working on porting KGI to FreeBSD. While he has been finding Linuxisms, he has also been looking into incorporating some FreeBSD especifics, in particular newbus. There has been a lot of discussion on the kgi-devel@sourceforge.net list about modifications to memory management for other systems. There was also a preliminary discussion in FreeBSD-arch towards modernizing the console, also possibly porting wscons to FreeBSD. Even when we are few developers from the BSD side, there is a first port of KGI to FreeBSD, we expect the KGI key developers to adopt FreeBSD as their primary platform. More information on this port can be found here: http://people.freebsd.org/~nsouch/ggiport.html There is a lot left to do. Future steps include defining a good interface and porting other graphic libraries like MGL and Allegro to support the accelerated infraestructure. NetBSD developers would be very welcome to contribute on the lists. Graphic developers are not easy to find in the BSDs, but the IMHO best graphical UNIX-like systems right now (MachOS X and IRIX) are based on BSD 4.4. best regards and see you in kgi-devel, Pedro. ______________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Cellulari: loghi, suonerie, picture message per il tuo telefonino http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/?http://it.mobile.yahoo.com/index2002.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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