Re: [9fans] VBE 1.2/2.0+ functions for Plan9

[Bob Hartley <bob.hartley@rogers.com>]

Oh well, I was hoping it would be something nice the way the new 
FreeBSD allows loading Windows NIC drivers, except we have access to 
the sources for X11.

I will take a look at this in case some of the drivers are simply table 
driven list of port numbers and data values to write.

Thanks anyways,

Rob

On Nov 25, 2004, at 10:08 PM, Russ Cox wrote:

>> Please correct me if I am wrong on this:
>> Is it true that the XFree86 device driver modules are platform
>> portable, as long as they are for the same instruction set
>> architecture?  For some rason I thought the Linux and BSD mobs could
>> swap video drivers around amoungst themselves.
>
> As long as you want to use them for X.
>
>> If so, would it be possible to create some sort of adapter code that
>> would wrap the x11 device drivers for Plan9 use?
>
> Possible?  Yes.  Particularly easy?  Nowhere close.
> The X interface is much more complicated than the
> Plan 9 interface, and the interface is very different.
> In particular Plan 9 splits the job between user space
> and the kernel, while X goes through some hoops to
> do everything in user space.  I doubt I would want to load
> X modules into the kernel, even if someone did do the
> huge amount of work to pull it off.
>
> I wonder if instead there is a way to pull the relevant
> information out of the code and generate a Plan 9
> driver in its place.  That would still be a lot of work, but
> the final pieces might be better for our use.
>
> Russ
>