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Carmack Donates $10k to Mesa
Emil writes wrote in to tell us that that John Carmack [?]
has donated $10k to Mesa [?] to assist in the development
of optimized 3d drivers for release with Mesa 3.1. Very cool.
You can find out more about Id
or check out The Mesa Website.
Update: 05/13 04:24 by H :In somewhat related news, RealTime wrote to say "Precision Insight (the people funded partly by RedHat?) have made available their design documents for the 3D Direct Rendering Infrastructure for XFree86. The final package will be released under an XFree86 style license. "
Have you seen this puppy? Built-in multi-head, environment bump-mapping, and Voodoo3 speeds?
Yeeha, I want one of THOSE for Quake3
I wonder how much of the G200 work will carry forward into the G400.
DG
but will your i386 binary driver run on my Alpha? :(
I think you meant to say, "The game is already here for Win32. It's called EverQuest."
First Quake3, now this. He really is God.
Mostly everyone compares unfavourably to Carmack, *EXCEPT* for Tim Sweeney. Singling him out seems ridiculous to me. He's as much of a single minded coding machine as Carmack is, managing to do a *phenomenal* amount of work. The overall architecture of Unreal is quite a bit slicker and modular the even Quake is (object oriented game script language, installable mods). In addition the OpenGL "driver" portion of Unreal is actually open sourced! In this respect he has a leg up on Carmack.
(Carmack still owns in the portability arena of course).
It's really nice to see heros appearing in the programming community (Carmack, Torvalds, Stallman, Wall, etc.).
I wonder if there's any way we can convince him to release an old game like the full (not just shareware) Doom or Quake I under the GPL (not the semifree license Doom is under right now). That would be kind of cool, since it would:
a) Let Red Hat package an old, but still really good, game with the distribution
b) Give a testbed for new technologies (I'm probably going to work on 3d sound this summer, and I wouldn't mind having some GPL game to hack it into; I wouldn't want to waste my time on something less than GPL).
Anyways, Carmack is definitely one of the few people in the industry who tends to (a) kick much ass but (b) at the same time, follow his ethics. I really respect that.
Of course Matrox still doesn't even have a final version of OpenGL for Windows yet! As somebody said a on a web page somewhere:
Matrox+OpenGL=HAHA
Oh look, a couple of GGI goons in a planned attempt to evangelize your wretched graphics
platform.
Get over it...GGI will never amount to anything.
KGI will NEVER EVER be a part of the standard
Linux kernel, not even as an option.
Alan Cox is against it, Geert Utterhoeven is
against it, Dave Miller is against it, and
Linus is Super King Kamehameha against it.
You're locked out by all the major maintainers.
Add to that the stunt you guys pulled by trying to
send John Carmack GGI quake patches based on
stolen source. You cheesed him off, and then the
little GGI goons on the mailing list whine "I'll never buy another Id game again!".
The future of Linux graphics is Xfree 4.0, GLX and
MLX. Not GGI, not KGI, not GII, no way, not ever.
Graphics drivers dont belong in the kernel, not now, not ever. It ruined NT's stability, it would
ruin Linux'es.
"The kernel isnt stable because it's a kernel, it's stable because I dont listen to arguments like yours" -- Linus Torvalds to Jon Taylor
"Graphics in Linux means X. Everything else is
noise" -- Linus
I warn you about these GGI people. They've been
seduced by a sexy-sounding idea, without any clue
of the rather large and unavoidable negative
consequences of kernel graphics.
Actually, his couldn't even get a computer until he turned 18 and moved out of the house. His mom didn't think programming was a good career, ironically.
"can I at least do the same thing with an Xfree 4.0 server? i.e. Is it possible to map
:(
an active Xterm session window onto, say, the surface of a tilted square?"
There's nothing to prevent it.
I looked on the GGI screenshots page and investigated this. cube3d is a hacked X server,
you could do this sort of thing with graphical source.
There was a hack to XMame that allowed this sort
of thing with Voodoo2 cards.
Cube3d, however, is eye candy. It shouldnt be
touted as a "MAJOR GGI FEATURE" that can only be
done by their method.
To tell you the truth, the last thing I want to
worry about is the # of FPS of my desktop
" You think graphics in the kernel would be unstable?
Have you ever had X Windows crash?"
No! I have been using Linux for just under 5
years now, and I can say, with authority, that
X HAS NEVER CRASHED FOR ME!
Occasionally, very rarely, and not even once since
Xfree 3.3, there have been a few occasions where
Netscape grabbed control of the keyboard and mouse
and not let go...and a reboot was required.
BUT THAT IS *NOT* A CRASH! The linux kernel was
still functioning properly.
A serial terminal or networked Telnet could have
fixed it. In many cases a few Magic-SysRq chords
fixes it.
Virtually 100% of my Linux crashes are swap death.
X has been nothing but ROCK SOLID for 18 months
now. Not even Netscape knocks over 3.3.3.1.
MesaGPL? No -- it's not encumbered/infected by
gpl.
The reason that they dont call it MesaGL
is that they're friendly with the OpenGL
crowd, but calling it MesaGl might imbalance
that, AND they don't exactly have the cash
to handle a lawsuit (against the OpenGL
people)
(sorry, looking at my previous post, I didnt
say quite what I wanted to)
I have always wondered why someone didnt, just for
a lark, write an X server for Voodoo-glide (which
are 3D-only cards).
Like I said, someone did this before with XMame,
and yes it allowed smooth scaling and lets you
tilt and rotate the image. Cute, but not all
that useful.
Lo and behold someone does it. woohoo.
Again, there really isnt anything to prevent anyone from doing that with any graphics library.
With SVGAlib, a regular suid-root Xserver, etc.
I wouldnt expect this to gain any widespread
usage. There's going to be a speed penalty,
tilting and scaling introduce distortions. It
also looks like they're forced to use really tiny
windows for everything -- I wouldnt use 640x480
even if there were 6 of 'em wrapped around a cube.
What I heard about the 3D support in XFree 4.0 was that it was done in cooperation with Mesa. So I think this is a fairly good place for him to be putting money, unless I'm fatally mistaken (which happens a lot :-) )
Daniel
First, let me say that I'm all for ope source, freeware and multi-platform support, HOWEVER, I really don't like the word "donation" as it's being used here. Donation has the connotation of benefiting humanity, and let's face it, 3d graphics don't feed the hungry or shelter the homeless. Although it's great to see people giving grants to help further technology instead of buying one more ivory back scratcher, it's not the most benevolent act in the world.
Having recently downloaded Q3test for both Linux and Windows (I have Voodoo2 SLI), I have been VERY impressed with Mesa. With the Linux version using the id supplied Mesa compiled for Glide, I get no visual artifacts. In the Windows version with new 3dfx V2 driver, I get clipped explosions, blinking/flashing light coronas, blinking/flashing portal graphics, and ugly patterns in some smoke. To top it off, the frame rate is better in the Linux version. Kudos to Brian Paul and those responsible for the Mesa 3dfx/Glide driver!
Dave K
daking at infinet dot com
I agree. 3D HW support in Linux is important to me and I don't have the time to contribute by coding or organizing, so I'd be happy to contribute monetarily to get/keep people working full time on open source drivers.
Dave K
daking at infinet dot com
This move certainly erased any doubts I had about buying quake3.
"Um, actually, that is a crash. It's an application crash "
Exactly, Application crashes, but system and kernel continue to function. Console is hosed, but the local console is only one of many possible access methods.
Kernel video driver crashes -> whole system falls over.
The security risk of running things as root is
minimal...your worries about suid-root are out
of proportion with reality.
I'm satisified with the rationale behind fbcons,
and so far, my fears with regard to it mutating
into a dozen different versions for different
video cards mostly hasnt materialized.
Video drivers in the kernel puts system stability at
risk...there's no way to rationalize or deny your
way around it.
GGI project may well continue it's work, but they're going
to have to live with the fact that neither KGI nor
KGIcon will ever be a part of the Linux kernel source tree.
um, really what he's talking about is not a crash, it's a resource deadlock.
i've remember the problem before, with old Netscape 2.x and 3.x. The pointer would be stuck pointing up and to the right. IIRC, if you pressed ESC or ctrl-c about a billion times, it might let go. On Comp.os.linux.x one time I read that it was a bug in Netscape's particular Motif library.
Having *any* code running on a system puts its stability at risk. I understand that X and kernel crashes are separate beasts but for me (and I suspect for 90% of even Linux users) the distinction is academic. Even if the code was as buggy as X (and I would generally not advocate putting any more code than is absolutely necessary into the kernel), the advantages--finally letting the kernel hand out access to video resources for a start--outweigh the possible defects *for most people*. People who are really concerned about their computer's stability (like, have to keep web server up 24-hours) shouldn't have any more code compiled into the kernel than is necessary anyway..heck, they can even get rid of the virtual consoles :-)
The best thing (IMO) about GGI is that it doesn't require KGI--or any other specific interface--to run.
Daniel
Care to back up your ranting with some actual facts?
I ran into $45... from an old friend who never payed me back (he accually reminded me). I'll add 5 to that to make it $50 and send my donation in!
hell, $50 is 4 pizzas.
If you had ever played a quality text-based MUD you would recognize that Everquest is a pretty sad excuse for a MUD-like game. Maybe next time.
Other cool features will be TrueType font support and antialiasing (YES!!).
Where did you read this? Can respond with a link please.
thanks.
Get real. It's his money and he can do whatever he wants with it. It's wonderful that he donated any money at all. Have you donated 10K to any cause recently? Err... Rather have you donated ANYTHING to any cause recently? If not, then why not hypocrite?
PS. I regularly donate both hardware and cash to worthy projects.
go to the XFree86 web site at www.xfree86.org and look for the "future releases" link.
Clearly it doesn't say anything about anti aliased font support so I'll assume you were talking out of yer arse.
Thanks anyway tho.
Hey, I'm willing to donate $50 (money that I will save by NOT buying an unsupported card). If we can get 200 others to donate the same amount, we can match Carmack's donation (and make a strong statement about how much we want good, supported, HW 3D acceleration under Linux).
:)
Or we could partition the money out to Darryl Straus and others, as a sort "flip-side" to Carmack's donations.
Anyone interested in coordinating the effort? (Don't look at me; I'm homeless at the moment until graduate school starts
Chad Netzer
"Graphics in the kernel did not ruin NT's stability. Show me a version of NT without graphics in the kernel which is more stable and I'll
concede"
NT 3.1, 3.5 and 3.51 did not have the GDI in their
kernels. It is WIDELY accepted by users and
developers that putting GDI in ring 0 was a mistake
that really hurt NT. Now, NT is totally at the
mercy of the video drivers.
Even Microsoft has been wary about porting DirectX
to NT....they'd like it to at least have a shred of
a chance at being an enterprise solution.
Even Microsoft isnt dumb enough to use DirectX for their desktop.
Ideally, for stability, you'd want the kernel to
be as small and simple as possible...only having
necessary drivers in the kernel. Now, Linux isnt
a microkernel, but the "line in the sand" is that
graphics cards and video drivers are more complex
and larger than hardware/drivers for other cards.
I'm supprised that no one brought up the 'Bussiness point of view' on this.. That is, Carmack believes that giving away 10k will probably improve his bottom line by 10k (i.e. 10k worth of sales to Linux users).
Intresting.
Matrox G200 is "slightly" accelerated, and as it
stands, even once the drivers are mature, will
probably only reach Voodoo1 speeds.
Matrox has withheld specs for their "Warp engine"
which does hardware triangle setup.
Despite 3dfx's recent job offers, it doesnt look
like the video card manufacturers are buckling at
all on the issue of proprietary specs. It's all
lip service so far.
"Why not? How are graphics fundamentally different than, say, network cards?"
Because they're a *lot* more complicated.
Video cards these ARE computers in their own
right. Modern video drivers are among the largest
and most complicated (code-wise) of any drivers
that a modern OS will use. More code == more opportunity
for bugs, and bugs in the kernel are *really* bad
news. You want to keep that stuff well isolated
from anything that could take the whole system
down.
Add to that the fact that the kernel is constantly
changing. It would take a great deal of vigilance
to keep the KGI drivers in working order. Open
source is *NOT* magic, and plenty of Linux kernel
drivers in the past have broken, and stayed
broken for a LONG time.
GGI people will tell you that it's impossible to
write stable video drivers outside the kernel.
It's not true, the drivers for my particular card
are very stable, and X has _NEVER_ crashed my
system.
GGI people, in the many arguments I've had with
them, show their colors: they're game playing,
X haters. They love to rail against X..."it's
big, it's bloated, it's slow, it's insecure, yada
yada yada". On my current system, X, at it's
peak requires less than 5% CPU time and less than
5% of memory. It's NOT bloated, it's NOT slow.
And there's really little of any substance to
fear from suid root X, and even that problem will
be solved without the "ripping up the floorboards"
KGI approach.
May 1999 - John Carmack of id Software, Inc. has made a donation of
US$10,000 to the Mesa project to support its continuing development.
Mesa is a free implementation of the OpenGL 3D graphics library and id's
newest game, Quake 3 Arena, will use Mesa as the 3D renderer on Linux.
The donation will go to Keith Whitwell, who has been optimizing Mesa to
improve performance on 3d hardware. Thanks to Keith's work, many
applications using Mesa 3.1 will see a dramatic performance increase
over Mesa 3.0. The donation will allow Keith to continue working on
Mesa full time for some time to come.
For more information about Mesa see www.mesa3d.org. For more
information about id Software, Inc. see www.idsoftware.com.
Brian Paul
brian_paul@mesa3d.org
May 12, 1999
I read that the server port was running... but that a client port was unlikely
/Andreas
Carmak has been quite active on the g200 mailing list... (talked general driver opt. looked at the code, etc.)
it's really cool to have his input and point of view on, what is arguably, his domain...
you don't see guys like tim sweeny (sp?) (of unreal) looking at the g200 code the day q3test is supposed to ship for windows!
i believe that he (they - id) has made it (obviously) and has realized that he has made it, and now wants to do 'the right thing' (in their eyes, obviously not opensource q3, but q1 soon). cross platform, help support work on linux, push mac to get off their asses, looked at M$ and decided that if anyone was going to get openGL sorted out (driver wise) that id was going to have to do it themselves, or even push that the graphic card co's put out full opengl drivers... q3 uses a limited subset of openGL (like 90% of the calls are to one method, so that driver guys can easily optimize) and he could have stuck w/ the miniGL hacks that people had, but instead he has single handedly forced all the major card manufactorers to supply the world w/ working openGL drivers, this benifits the end user more than anyone else (ok, the M$ end user).
i wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, he has a few words w/ someone like matrox on behalf of the g200 group (i can dream at least)
henri
As soon as Glide 3 becomes available for Linux I plan to spend alot of time making EverQuest run under Wine.
This potential is already there in quake*, particularly in quake2 with the dll/so game code. Anything is possible.
Posted by DextiusAlphaeus:
:)
If there was one person that I look up to in this world.. It's him.. The amount of pure focus radiating from him is a driving force in my life... (almost equal to Max Cohen in Pi
Thanks JC...
-D.Alphaeus
I love the links. "Everything" should be cross referenced. Why else use hypertext?
TedC
AFAIK most video cards can't be reset from an inconsistent state without a hard reset of the host system, so this isn't entirely a software problem. Same goes for keyboards; I've had the keyb controller crash and leave me stranded without an input device other then the mouse. Technically neither the kernel not X has crashed, but I can't even exit X using . It would be nice to have a hard-wired key for this purpose.
As far as XFree86 never crashing, running XF86Setup and selecting a 104-key PS/2 keyb does it for me. I'm using a standard 104-key Dell keyb, nothing fancy.
TedC
I forgot that angled brackets get intrerpreted as HTML tags...
TedC
At least a binary driver would let me run Linux on my new box. I have a Spectra 3200 TNT card but no driver for Linux. I wrote Nvidia twice asking for drivers... hopefully they will get a driver out soon.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
IIRC, it was more like $30k...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
That game is already here. It's called EverQuest.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
http://www.ggi-project.org/screenshots. html :)
Occasionally, very rarely, and not even once since Xfree 3.3, there have been a few occasions where Netscape grabbed control of the keyboard and mouse and not let go...and a reboot was required. BUT THAT IS *NOT* A CRASH! The linux kernel was still functioning properly.
Um, actually, that is a crash. It's an application crash (as opposed to a system crash).
Look, here's the thing I see about putting graphics in the kernel: for security reasons, it is a Good Thing. There should (ideally) be no program that ever has to run suid-root; it's simply a security risk. But put in as little of the graphics code as possible (I haven't taken much of a look at the framebuffer, but even that might be enough).
Hell, GGI as a library is quite nice. And being able to run the same app from the command-line or X and have it come up with a GUI is a Good Thing too.
So yeah, I think minimal graphics support should be in the kernel; just enough to keep things like X-servers from having to be run suid-root (that goes for Xwrapper as well). But it should be kept to a minimum, at least until they're rock-solid (and don't start with the "graphics ruin stability" bit; bad or lazy programming ruins stability, not graphics). And that support might be there already; I'm not well-versed enough in the framebuffer to be certain of that.
Kernel video driver crashes -> whole system falls over.
Yes. However, this wasn't the video driver crashing. It was one app. A properly-written driver can handle one app crashing, just as the kernel itself can.
However, I think we're beginning to talk different things here. What I am advocating is that the kernel support graphics primitives. The video driver can still reside outside the kernel; the kernel "graphics layer" simply provides a common graphics API which accesses these drivers. Something basic enough to build an X server on is all that's really needed (though I am intrigued by Berlin).
Just because something is hard to do doesn't mean it should not be done. It just means that it has to be monitored and done very carefully. It'd probably take an entire devel tree cycle to get it done properly. But I believe the benefits are worth it.
I don't think you can set up your own EQservers with new worlds and rules. Or build on the world(s). And you have to pay for time playing. (Problably why they only allow games on their servers)
I'd someday want to be able make enough money to afford an F-50 doing what I love...
Hum, I think that I'd settle for making *any* money doing what I love...
Drinks are on the house!
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
Maybe we will see it someday. I think they should plan for it. This requires making a GLXcontext and an X "GC" be the same object, making OpenGL start up with an "identity" transformation that matches the X coordinates (currently it comes up undefined), and as a temporary stopgap, making all X drawing not work if the current GL transform is not the identity or if Z buffer is on (so that people don't use it and then complain later on when it does not work).
I would also like to see X *always* provide a 32-bit true color visual and fake it on the display hardware, so we could stop thinking about those stupid colormaps!
You're probably correct here. I might just be blind to something, but I can't see anything but benefits coming from releasing hardware specs. They won't have to pay in-house developers to release binary drivers. I'd also be more quick to buy some piece of hardware if I knew that it had good drivers.
He should have bought an RX-7
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Dude, it's Romero who blows $$$ on overhyped autos.. Carmack actually codes...
(PS: did anyone else see the TV show (Motorweek, IIRC, or possibly C&D) that featured his ferraris and the tuners which hacked them? I felt like smacking the guy.. Who could buy fucking cars like that when there's bandwidth to be had? Thinks he's a fucking rock star.. grumblesmurf..)
Now if we can just get Billgatus to donate 1% of his fortune......well, let's just say sirloin would be commonplace around the households of MESA guys. =)
Way to go JC!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
> I don't know enough about the itty-bitty details of graphics-device
> interfaces to take a particular stand on whether they should go into
> the kernel or user space or a little of both (the last seems most
> likely).
That is in fact what GGI actually does. KGI
drivers are typically pretty thin (generally enough to successfully
arbitrate hardware access among a number of userland processes)
and then most of the stuff goes on in LibGGI. LibGGI,
incdentally, can work on top of a lot of stuff besides KGI (i.e. X), so it's compatible with other Unixes (even those without a KGI layer) too.
DNA just wants to be free...
The Free Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization, so donations to them are tax deductable. I don't know if they want hardware or not, but money is always appreciated. :-)
People donate stuff all the time to these causes. I know friends of mine who have given up video and sound cards to have someone develop linux drivers for them. I wonder if at some point they will be seen as tax write-offs and these donations can increase a thousand-fold.
Eventually programmers could be paid for their donations though others donations.
-----------
Resume
Football Sports Contest - Win $500 for having an e
..who blew 100K to install twin turbos on his F50?
This *investment* is a joke. Developers need some real money to fix this abomination of a grafical subsystem of X..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
... or one of these other car magazines
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
... between actually donating something useful, and using this for self promotion...
Sure it is his money and he earned them. That does not make this donation less of an ego promotion...
P.S. I do not donate and do not plan to. I find good use for what money I got.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
It will have OpenGL integration on a better level than win9X/directx. And eventually full 3d hardware support for everything. Other cool features will be TrueType font support and antialiasing (YES!!). We'll all be able to play Q3 Arena faster and with full hardware accelaration someday ;-). Carmack should have really given the money to XFree86, seeing as how their project is much more significant to most users, linux, and to him.
-- d'arcy poirot
I noticed that on their web page they have asked folks not to use MesaGL for legal reasons. How about MesaGPL :)
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
Thats why I said the specs were incomplete :)
Although financial support is definitely something many spare-time-Linux-hackers only dream of, what the Linux 3D community really needs is the cooperation of hardware vendors. Only then will accellerated 3D on Linux be able to compete with the Windows platform.
Matrox has made the first, and biggest step. They have released nearly their entire specification for the G200 chip. This has generated a big development effort, seemingly overnight, to finally get an accellerated 3D solution for Linux. Although the released specification was incomplete, it was enough to get rudimentary 3D support started.
As of late, Quake2 runs accellerated on G200 hardware. And best of all, the source is with us.
Recently, other 3D hardware companies seem to be dipping their toes in the water. 3DFX and nVidia have indicated their interest in Linux, with 3DFX looking to hire Linux specialists, and nVidia pledging a binary-only solution, but I argue that these are not as desirable. The whole "Linux way" revolves around community-based open source efforts, and this requires that a chip's specification be released.
Don't get me wrong. A binary-only driver is better than nothing, but not much better.
One concern among 3D hardware vendors is that releasing the specification will allow competitors an edge. True, the 3D hardware market is competitive at best and downright cutthroat at worst. But let's get real for a minute. A 3D card's lifespan is about six months. It takes this long for an even better card to come out that blows away the previous one. I find it hard to believe that in six months, a competitor can take a register-level specification, reverse engineer it, design, test, and manufacture a better chip (remember we need a _better one_ in six months) and beat the sales of the original chip. It's just not feasable, especially since all the hardware companies already have so much invested in their own R&D.
Point is, hardware companies, please listen to reason. It is only beneficial to release your chip specifications. Upon doing so, you will 1. gain the trust and respect of the Linux community, 2. get free Linux support from the talented developers who are just foaming at the mouth to write drivers for your chip, and 3. be able to compete in the Linux 3D market which despite what Microsoft tells you is not going away any time soon.
If you don't have a linux strategy by now, you should be asking yourself why not?
Could you please stop putting all the little plugs for "Everything" on the Slashdot news stories?
YOu know what i'd do? I'd buy that car, put at such expensive toys in it as possible and SMASH IT WITH A BAT.
MAN would that feel good.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Ummm, but don't hackers get hungry and need shelter? I see no reason not to use the word "Donation" in this case. Besides, I don't agree with your definition of how the word should be used anyways. If you give money to a cause that you think is worthy of your money then it is a donation.
---
It is widely expected that the Quake source will be released when Q3 is finished.
And a donation to a library only helps people who can read. It's not that big of a difference, after all. It is a donation for something that is freely available to all, just like a donation to a library or museum. Or maybe it's more like sponsoring a poet or author on the condition that he/she release the work to the public for free. The point is, there is much more to charity and donations than feeding and clothing the homeless. Sure that's a great way to make the world a better place, but it's far from the only way.
Whilst playing Q3test last night, John mentioned in passing that NVidia has (mostly) working TNT drivers.
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
I've never used GGI, so my question to you has to be, can I at least do the same thing with an Xfree 4.0 server? i.e. Is it possible to map an active Xterm session window onto, say, the surface of a tilted square?
The Precision Insight solution mentions direct 3D rendering into a window; direct rendering of a window into a 3D environment isn't mentioned...
Maybe all that's required is extending the capabilities of a traditional (2D) window manager (that was my original idea, but the hardware-direct path in X wasn't there) to support 3D "rooms" and rewrite the basic apps to texture-map onto room-object surfaces...
I'm open to suggestions, and I'd rather not re-invent the wheel; I definitely prefer OpenGL-based solutions. Maybe I'll should take another stab at my original train-of-thought.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Yup, it mentions the 3D support and the like.
:-)
XFree86 4.0 is starting to look a lot more feasable as a platform for me to develop my ideas as I had originally wanted - as an extension of the window manager's functionality, not a (self) modified X server. My most likely plan of attack will be to add a second, active icon mode/state, where the the window contents become texture-mapped onto objects in the root. The I/O will be a bit tricky, but I have a couple of texture-based solutions in mind...
Thanks for all the feedback! (didn't expect that one comment to trigger such a large thread
--The more you know, the less you know.
My own little pet-peeve is that X is still stuck in/with the 2D-window metaphor.
IMHO, direct 3D rendering into multiple X11 windows is too limiting. I want to be able to do it the other way as well; render X11 windows into/onto 3D objects.
I'm tired of looking through windows; I want to be in that room on the other side!
--The more you know, the less you know.
Graphics drivers dont belong in the kernel, not now, not ever
Why not? How are graphics fundamentally different than, say, network cards?
He's like Jimi Hendrix - very narrowly focused and very good at what he does. Of course, he may not be a well-rounded person, but why does it matter?
His donation to Mesa is a sign of his focus.
and also a TT setup on his testarossa; that thing is damn fast. The F50 showed almost no increase with the turbos though, cuz it hasn't been tweaked at all. geez, i'd love to drop 50k on a turbo kit and not care :)
Very cool, indeed. A while ago Carmack donated $10k to the FSF, too, because Quake (the original, true, DOS version) was built with djgpp. If I remember his .plan update correctly, he did that after winning the cash in Las Vegas...
:-) Seems he just wants the world to be a better place. Technically.
It's good to see him putting some of the money he earns to good use (as opposed to buying one more Ferrari
Carmack has 3 Ferraris. Actually, he had 4, then decided to give the 348 (I think) away in the tourney last year. And he has quite the penchant for hopping his cars up - he put a twin turbo on his new F50.
- nr
god of 3d coding, oh wait isn't reality 3d? ooops, nope.
+&x
Very cool!
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Thanks John, you're a wise and generous man: Wise to help foster growth and acceptance of Linux, generous with your dollars. I'd nominate you for sainthood but I suspect da Pope wouldn't understand (yet!)
How about hooks into the next Quake engine to allow for greatly expanded items and attributes? The Quake engine would make a great starting point for a 3D graphical MUD environment. Look at combining a current MUD database (the latest ROM would be best, IMHO) with the graphics engine and voila, the game of the future.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
>"Why not? How are graphics fundamentally different than, say, network cards?"
>
> Because they're a *lot* more complicated.
More complex than a NIC driver? Yeah. But more complex than, say, a distributed filesystem? No, not really. As you say:
>Video cards these ARE computers in their own right.
Yep, they're complicated, but that's because an awful lot of complexity is _in the card_. Is the _interface_ to a graphics card's functionality more complex than other kernel entities? Again, no, not really.
A lot of people have serious misunderstandings about what should or should not go into the kernel. Generally, I think things should be kept out of the kernel unless there's a good reason for putting them in, but such good reasons are not uncommon. At the same time, I think that allowing user-level access to hardware resources is a bad idea, but if it's done in a very tightly controlled way it can be great. For example, at Dolphin I worked on a shared-memory card. If it had worked properly, processes on separate nodes could share memory as easily and transparently (and almost as quickly) as processes on the same node. That would have been way cool. Of course, an important part of the hardware and software design was how to allow applications access to the mapped data areas without allowing them to access control stuff, and as of the time I left the card didn't really work very well anyway. So we have examples of how all these "rules" can and should be broken in specific cases.
Two of the best reasons for putting stuff in the kernel have to do with address spaces and synchronization. The address-space problems are readily resolvable in more advanced research-type operating systems, at least mostly, but in some ways the fundamental and unchangeable UNIX model of processes and address spaces etc. makes this extremely difficult and a new driver is still safer/easier than a severely-hacked virtual memory system even if it's harder/riskier than a user-space program. The synchronization issues are probably more important wrt putting graphics in the kernel or not. If all you're mapping into user space is frame buffers, fine; the worst that can happen is that somebody draws over somebody else's part of the screen. But as soon as you provide user-level access to any other graphics facilities at all, you start opening up a big synchronization Can O' Worms. In some ways, you end up more vulnerable than if you put the gritty bits in the kernel where proper synchronization (which may be complex and non-obvious or even impossible to do without a high level of data sharing which brings you into the address-space side of things) can be rigidly enforced.
I don't know enough about the itty-bitty details of graphics-device interfaces to take a particular stand on whether they should go into the kernel or user space or a little of both (the last seems most likely). I just think that most of the arguments I've seen on the issue are totally "off" wrt why we should or should not implement things in-kernel. There seems to be a lot more ideology and stubbornness involved than actual risk assessment or performance modeling.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
He brings joy to millions of computer owners worldwide. He probably grew up a total dork, parked behind his 286 for most of his childhood, didn't kiss a girl until he was 20 and you guys bag him for buying an expensive car. Weak. He's got the right idea, spend your teen years learning how to code extremely well, then get rich buy a fast car and get some action when you're older. Smart guy, this one.