Antw: Re: kill -9 <pid of X>

Axel Eble (aeble@controlware.de)
Thu, 13 Aug 1998 14:44:28 +0200

>To ensure system stability, all hardware access has to be confined to
>device drivers which run in the kernel, so that they are
>sanity-checked and when a process exits prematurely, it is ensured the
>hardware state is not left undefined. That's the traditional reasoning
>and I think it is valid even if a heap of video drivers in the kernel
>would be as messy as the current heap of network drivers. ;-)

you would need only one driver in the kernel: the text console driver.
That's enough to get the system into a mode where an install program
could load the video drivers for the graphics hardware on the system.
So essentially you would have two video drivers: one for the text mode
and one for the specific type of crappy PC video card :-)

Am I wrongo there?

>Everything else belongs in user space. Really I think the proper way
>to make an X server is to have a framebuffer device spiced with
>acceleration ioctls[2], and let the X server use that. But that needs
>some kernel support, limited mostly to mode switching and stuffing
>commands into the accelerator parts. It would be messy but it wouldn't
>necessary _have_ to be as messy as XFree86 is currently.

Sounds like a sensible concept to me. That way one would have
a common interface, only one X server would be necessary, that one
could be completely revamped etc.

And what's more: one would be reminded of "real" computers booting
like an SGI or a NeXT :-)

Axel

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