Yet another OpenGL X Window System modification

[ProviaFan]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx

This is another way of attacking similar issues to what XGL has been doing. I like the concept, but Redhat's examples in particular are terrible from a usability point of view, and are entirely useless (note the amount of time required to finish the "minimzing window" animation, for example). I hope and would not be surprised that they'll have these replaced with something much better when they actually release the thing.

Oh, by the way, maybe you can test it. I can't, because I only have an otherwise-well-supported-in-Linux NVidia Geforce 6600 - a fairly low end modern card. Unfortunately, about the only things that AIGLX supports are much older and much lower end ATI Radeons - NVidia cards are distinctly verboten. Besides, it seems like a good portion of the literature on the page is ranting about how they don't like XGL, and claims (baseless or not, I don't know) that everyone else except Novell employees hates XGL, too. Maybe I'm just being too negative, because I'll have a snowball's chance in hell of ever running it, since that happens to be the chance of NVidia releasing open source drivers. Oh well... </sigh>

 

[n0cmonkey]

Known to not work

ATI: Radeon 9500 through X850 (r300 and r400 generations). Some issues with rectangular textures may be fixed in new DRM CVS, need to verify.

ATI: Rage 128. Looks like driver locking issue.

ATI: Mach64. No DRM support in Fedora, still insecure.

Matrox: MGA G200 to G550. Needs at least a driver update to fix DRI locking. PCI cards probably have other issues as well.

nVidia: Any. No open DRI driver. Closed driver support coming soon though.

3dfx: Voodoo 1 and 2. No DRI driver.

ATI: Radeon 8500 through X850 with the closed fglrx driver. Uses an ancient version of the DRI driver API that can't work with the new driver loader. No ETA on closed driver support.

Anything without a free 3d driver.

Maybe nVidia will release a closed source driver for it.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Maybe nVidia will release a closed source driver for it.

Ah, so evidently they could. I would be fine with that, though there would be a very vocal [most likely very small] minority that would keep whining about it and would try to convince all of us that an ATI Radeon 9250 is all that we'd ever need. :roll:

Without understanding the architecture behind both of these, XGL sounds like a better approach long-term, but who knows which one will succeed? Or will we be left with two slightly driver-incompatible X Window System implementations designed to do [to the end user's perspective] exactly the same thing?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: ProviaFan

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Maybe nVidia will release a closed source driver for it.

Ah, so evidently they could. I would be fine with that, though there would be a very vocal [most likely very small] minority that would keep whining about it and would try to convince all of us that an ATI Radeon 9250 is all that we'd ever need. :roll:

Without understanding the architecture behind both of these, XGL sounds like a better approach long-term, but who knows which one will succeed? Or will we be left with two slightly driver-incompatible X Window System implementations designed to do [to the end user's perspective] exactly the same thing?

Hopefully they'll be compared based on technical merit, and one will be chosen to be the future. And the other one will continue to be developped for years in someone's basement until it grows big and strong and takes over the internet 3.