From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 22:08:47 -0500 From: Russ Cox To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] VBE 1.2/2.0+ functions for Plan9 In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0cd11568-eace-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > 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