Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 18 Dec 1999 13:09:21 -0500 | From | Raul Miller <> | Subject | Re: Thread-private mappings and graphics (was Re: Per-Processor Data Page) |
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> I don't believeing in place OpenGL in the kernel but I do believe the > kernels only job is to virtualize the hardware. To make it seem that > this piece of hardware belongs to one process when in fact its being > used in a mulituser environment. Its a simple but yet beatiful idea.
Why?
I seem to recall reading that 3dfx is abandoning glide for opengl, and that they expect that once the implementation is properly tuned that it will be faster than the current glide stuff.
You seem to want to move away from opengl in the direction requiring people to hard code support for individual boards into end user software.
The *only* reason I can think why this might be useful is where the system is being pushed to the limit, and ever last fractional percent efficiency is deemed worthwhile. Given that, you don't want to be sharing the board, you want to own it. And, even there, you're going to have to include support for a variety of targets -- so mesa should be one of your targets.
Or did I miss some important concept?
> Having userland manage hardware access will destroy this beauty. As I > pointed out userland locking gives you the best performace at the cost > of the system being unstable and having possible security holes. Its > is just plain dangerous for low end hardware. You are in the long run > end up with more complex tricks that will hurt performace to deal with > these problems.
That's why you only give direct access to the hardware to a (trusted) server, and you implement opengl as a library which talks to that server.
Doesn't mean that the server has to be X. If you've a separate monitor hooked up to your 3d card it even makes a certain amount of sense to do something other than X. But only a certain amount -- it's not clear to me that anyone is interested enough in this to make it worth deploying a stable system based on the concept.
But, the interface defined by opengl has a lot more long term potential than the random individual interfaces defined by all the various cards.
-- Raul
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