On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 11:28:45AM +0100, Jos Hulzink wrote: > Fbdev was never ment to do accelleration in the first place. Fbdev drivers are > not portable. When you really think about using the fbdev drivers as bottom > layer of X, you'll get a X server that has very OS and driver specific > features, for the fbdev driver is only available at Linux, and hacked into > FreeBSD. As long as there is no cross platform driver, you will be unable to > say: Just use this driver, and you'll have a full featured X system. fbdev is an _api_, and portable kernel drivers aren't liked very much in Linux, and that's for a reason. > KGI has a simple thought in mind that we only see back at the X drivers and > some commercial stuff: A driver must be able to run on any platform, with > only a recompile. That's a very good reason to not include it in the Linux Kernel :) It means you just created yet another UDI and let people write for some glue API that can never use all features of the Linux-native APIs. > Besides, fbdev was yet to be invented when GGI was started. I'm not sure how old GGI is around exactly, but fbdev was widely used on non-x86 Linux platforms when I first heard of GGI (about 1998). > Linus just didn't > like the idea of graphic drivers in a kernel, and our project team was so > small that we were unable to get our project goals clear. Even you current project goals don't look like they match up with the Linux kernel's..