RE: [Fwd: FW: Win32 XServer]

["Kendall Bennett" <KendallB at scitechsoft dot com>]

"Suhaib Siddiqi" <ssiddiqi@inspirepharm.com> wrote:

> I noticed a lot of suggestions from Kendall.  My understanding is
> John and Mike had been taking the same approaches. 

Sure, except for that fact that some people still seem bent on the 
idea of getting XF86_SVGA to program the hardware directly under 
Win32. Doing so will be a fruitless task due to the major 
compatbility issues that will ensue. The whole thrust of my posts has 
been to forget about doing that (at least for now), and get a good 
DirectX based server up and running.

> I also do not accept the idea of GDI.  It is too slow and not good
> for any X server. 

I tried to make this clear in my other posts, but I will re-iterate 
this again:  

 1. GDI *and* DirectDraw *can* be used at the same time for the 
primary surface under DirectX. Since the X-server will not be 
flipping this should be perfectly possible.

 2. DirectDraw can be used for some stuff, but not everything is 
available. Specifically DirectDraw does not support hardware line 
drawing, hardware pattern fills or hardware text.

 3. GDI can be used for those specific functions that can't be 
accelerated by DirectDraw, and those functions *will* use the 
hardware. Using the GDI line, pattern fill and text functions will 
blow away any software implementation (sure it won't be as fast as if 
you had native code from the XF86_SVGA server, but it will be faster 
than software).

> As far as DirectX is concerned, I would rather leave this topic to
> our exerts (John and Mike).  I am very confident they would do
> excellent job. 

I am sure they will do a excellent job. However I resent the 
insinuation that I don't know what I am talking about when it comes 
to DirectX. I know what I am talking about because I had done all of 
the DirectX code in our SciTech MGL graphics library; the same 
library that was used to port Quake to Windows, and has been used in 
countless commercial games on the Windows platform.

Perhaps actually *listening* to what I have to say would help you get 
to the ultimate goal of a working DirectX based X-sever in a more 
timely manner?

> Without Cygwin it certainly would not have been possible to port
> the code in xc/programs/Xserver/hw to Win32. 

Sure. But another thrust of my posts is that the code under that 
directory is not useful for the Win32 port anyway. Getting XF86_SVGA 
to compile is not a useful task, because getting it to work is 
fraught with major compatibility problems.

I think you have already found that it simply won't work out of the 
box, given that you have already gotten it compiling and linking.

Regards,

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