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XFree86 DRI on NetBSD

Posted by timothy on from the bare-metal dept.

Dan writes "Erik Reid has been working on adding DRI support for NetBSD. Direct Rendering Infrastructure, also known as the DRI Project, is a framework for allowing direct access to graphics hardware in a safe and efficient manner. Some of Erik's work has been imported into XFree86 4.3.0 which is now in xsrc tree. He has subsequently put together a fairly large patch which compiles and works on his NetBSD/i386 1.6P system with a matrox g450. Try out the patch and give him some feedback!"

3 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Re:*nix Support by CoolVibe · · Score: 5, Informative
    Merely recompiling will not do, since the API's of the underlying OS differ too much between the many BSD's. It still requires a lot of patching.

    Although there is a port of the FreeBSD nvidia drivers to NetBSD... Lemme dig up the uri...

    Ah, here it is:

    NVidia drivers on NetBSD

    Have fun!

  2. Re:Can anyone then tell me... by freyr · · Score: 3, Informative

    It shouldn't be too difficult to make it work on OpenBSD, though I'm not going to do it, and I'm not
    going to guarantee anything. :)

    Basically someone that knows something about OpenBSD needs to step up and start digging in. Eric Anholt did some fantastic work in abstracting some of the code, so it really wasn't tough to make it work on NetBSD.

    - Erik

  3. Re:This already exists. by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.projectudi.org/ Or existed, it seems like it hasn't been updated in a while.

    I did some work in this, interesting environment. All drivers are source compatible across all conforming environments. If the environments have the same C ABI (say, they're all x86) then the drivers are binary compatible. Caldera actually made this their native DDI for OpenUNIX 8. There are environments for OU8, Linux, and FreeBSD, and some drivers out there. One cool thing is that the environment handles MP. All your functions are guaranteed never to be interrupted. Downside is, it's a very different environment from what you're used to, and it takes a while to get your head around.

    As an aside, RMS doesn't like the environment because it makes it easier to release binary only drivers. Not only does it insulate youfrom DDI differences between platforms, but also between Linux kernel updates.