Xgl Developer Calls it Quits

nosoupforyou writes "Jon Smirl, one of two main developers for Xgl and Xegl (a version of X layered on top of OpenGL and rendering directly to the linux framebuffer, similar to Apple's Quartz Extreme) is calling it quits. Citing two years of effort without pay, a shortage of interest from developers, and no hope of release for more than a year, Jon is moving on."

Comments

Re:Good

[trevorcor]

A good deal of the point of XGL, once you get past the hype-machine eye-candy business, is that it means only *one* driver for every video card -- a DRI one. Eliminating the dichotomy between the 2D X drivers and the 3D DRI drivers will only improve driver support for both 2D and 3D -- the effort needed to support both will be halfed, and 3D support will be required to support 2D.

There's even been talk about porting the Linux kernel framebuffer drivers to the DRI interface (possibly in userspace, run from initramfs).

Have you ever tried to get an X server, accelerated 3D, and a framebuffer console to get along on the same machine? It's ugly.

Add in multi-monitor support, and you can't even do it. So it's not possible to have all of accelerated 3D, multiple monitors and a console on platforms like the Macintosh that don't have a text mode in hardware.

Jon Smirl was also doing work on DRI/DRM, an area of the Linux video "architecture" that's much in need of love. I'm really sad to hear that he's giving all his video work up -- I was really looking forward to the day the whole Linux video mess got cleaned up for good.