Re: A Question About the Direction of DragonFly BSD

["Devon H. O'Dell" <devon.odell@xxxxxxxxx>]

2005/9/2, Gregory Gelfond <grisha.gelfond@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Dear Sir,
> 
> I'm not entirely sure if this is the proper forum in which to ask this
> question, so I thought I would ask it here since at least on a surface
> level it seems kernel related.
> 
> I have a great deal of admiration for what you guys are
> attempting/succeeding to accomplish.  From what I understand the
> genesis of the project was to "fix everything that FreeBSD is doing
> wrong" especially with regards to SMP, but in other areas as well.
> One thing that has confused me from the beginning about Unixes in
> general is that there a great many ways of drawing objects (text and
> other data to the screen).  Linux has the framebuffer, X, there is
> DirectFB and other projects which are summarized here:
> http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html
> 
> Since so many other areas of the system are being reimplemented via
> more elegant solutions I was wondering if there were any plans to take
> a step back and look at the os level facilities for abstractions of
> video hardware, and reworking them along the same lines as the rest of
> the system.  For example providing a Plan 9 like file based interface
> to the graphics card/screen.
> 
> I apologize if this is the wrong forum for asking this question,
> Gregory Gelfond

I've actually wondered about creating libdraw and libmemdraw
interfaces for VESA. Sascha Wildner knows a lot more about this
subsystem than I do, and if Joerg would ever update us with when he's
actually going to do the work on the subsystem that he needs to do
before he will let us work on it (yes, I'm being obstinant because
it's been like 6 months now, Joerg :P), it would be a project I would
certainly help with.

I don't know whether we'd actually end up implementing VGA
accelleration for specific cards a-la Plan 9; I think the first hurdle
is getting it working with our current VESA framwork. Then we'd be
able to run rio natively with Plan 9 Port :D

--Devon