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Old 25th May 2009
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I believe you're thinking of the kernel mode-setting, which will soon be required in order to launch X, as all the mode-setting stuff will be removed from X once all the drivers are ported over to GEM (the new memory manager for X). There's already grumblings on the FreeBSD lists about having to get working mode-setting into the kernel, or some other mode-setting thingy to run before X is launched. From the sounds of things, the Fedora people are working on getting mode-setting into the kernel ... and that will be the interface that X uses (yeah, that's a portable programing model).
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by adamk View Post
To be fair, there is nothing, yet, from the linux kernel that is required to have an xterm.
Have you already met http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/irony
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by phoenix View Post
I believe you're thinking of the kernel mode-setting, which will soon be required in order to launch X, as all the mode-setting stuff will be removed from X once all the drivers are ported over to GEM (the new memory manager for X).
I'm curious as to where you heard that modesetting will be removed from the Xorg drivers?

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Old 25th May 2009
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Originally Posted by vermaden View Post
I am aware of irony. I did not detect any ironic tone to your post, however, which means that others might not detect it either and therefore take it quite seriously. It is important that we disseminate accurate information.

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Old 25th May 2009
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>It is important that we disseminate accurate information.

So I think 'Linux is a pile of crap' doesn't compute according to your definition of irony? ;-)
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Old 25th May 2009
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Originally Posted by Oliver_H View Post
>It is important that we disseminate accurate information.

So I think 'Linux is a pile of crap' doesn't compute according to your definition of irony? ;-)
Well around here that can either come across as very ironic or very serious :-) I'll refrain from stating my opinion on the matter as I have no desire to start a flamewar and, frankly, it's pretty irrelevent to the discussion at hand :-)

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Old 25th May 2009
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Hi. Can Xfee86 be installed in FreeBSD 7.x (how, ports/package/off the sources)? And Can it do 3D acceleration (the type that is required for games)?
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Old 25th May 2009
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Hi. Can Xfee86 be installed in FreeBSD 7.x (how, ports/package/off the sources)? And Can it do 3D acceleration (the type that is required for games)?
The issue with 3D acceleration is that it is highly dependent on DRM support, in the form of kernel modules. These are the parts most tied to the linux kernel (though there are DRM maintainers for FreeBSD and OpenBSD). Switching to XFree86, even if it's possible, is not going to change a thing.

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Old 25th May 2009
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phoenix, according to one of the most active developers of the radeon drivers...

"If the XAA/EXA switch is any indication, we're talking about four or five years before making it(1) the default, and probably another five years before it(2) gets ripped out."

(1) KMS
(2) Modesetting in the Xorg DDX.

I can't comment on modesetting for the intel drivers, but it doesn't look like radeon users have anything to worry about for quite a while.

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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
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Why? Most developers I know of are aware of this problem. It's a tightrope walk, '97%' of the software is written on Linux systems so *BSD has to be compatible or it will loose functionality. It's a Linux world already, you can deny something but if you want it, you have to adapt it. It's a sorry-state but reality.
But X is not Linux but if X wants to be absorbed into Linux then they should be looking elsewhere cause then it's not portable code anymore.

And lose is spelled l-o-s-e.
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Old 25th May 2009
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>But X is not Linux but if X wants to be absorbed into Linux then they should be looking elsewhere cause then it's not portable code anymore.

How can they write 'portable' code if most devs are using some kind of Linux? And how portable are drivers for X? So I think you get the pattern.
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by adamk View Post
I'm curious as to where you heard that modesetting will be removed from the Xorg drivers?
I'll have to dig to try and find the article, but I'm sure it was in an interview with one of the Fedora/RedHat developers that was working on enabling kernel mode-setting. It was along the lines of mode-setting will be pushed into the kernel, and once all drivers support GEM, they won't need mode-setting on their own, as randr would take care of changing resolutions at runtime. But I may be mis-remembering things or confusing things. I'll see if I can find the article, I'm sure it was linked from osnews.com.
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by adamk View Post
phoenix, according to one of the most active developers of the radeon drivers...

"If the XAA/EXA switch is any indication, we're talking about four or five years before making it(1) the default, and probably another five years before it(2) gets ripped out."

(1) KMS
(2) Modesetting in the Xorg DDX.

I can't comment on modesetting for the intel drivers, but it doesn't look like radeon users have anything to worry about for quite a while.
Good to know. But, who knows what kinds of weird changes will be pushed into X in the next 5 years.
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666
I never have problems with Xorg, instead of dismissing it entirely.. how about posting the configuration file so we can fix it for you?
It's nor a configuration issue, I've used the same configuration since ages.
Xorg stopped working after I updated last weekend, normally I don't really update that often, but I did so in the hope to solve three other xorg related problems:

o When switching from Xorg to a text-VT (i.e. CTRL-ALT-F1) Xorg leaves the screen in a garbled and unusable state... After switching a few times it does seem to work ... It *never* works after CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE (Needed sometimes for below issue).
I experienced the same problem with FC10 on three different machines recently ... VERY annoying.

o Sometimes when using the `Meta' (Or `Windows') modifier Xorg would freeze, only the mouse responding and CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE responds -- Note that I've been using the same WM (With the same config, and same version) for quite some time and never experienced this problem before.

o Stupid ``Xlib: extension "Generic Event Extension" missing on display ":0.0".'' warnings, annoying especially because I don't use menus and launch everything from inside xterms (Message is `mostly harmless', but just annoying).
The reason for this warning is rather silly, it's because the X libs support this extension, but it isn't supported by the X server yet ... Modular Xorg better my foot!

Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666
Windows is never a solution.
Windows doesn't freeze every few minutes ...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko
That is because you do not use vanilla XOrg You are using Xenocara
What is Xenocara anyway? I know it's Xorg converted to BSDMake (Instead of GNU autotools), but does it also contain fixes and stuff? In other words, is it really different (better) that vanilla Xorg?

Might it be worth trying to build&run Xenocara on FreeBSD?

Quote:
Originally Posted by adamk
Right now I have a simple, reliable, implementation of X.
There is no such thing as ``a simple implementation of X'' (... But this is a different rant ...)

Quote:
Originally Posted by vermaden
I wonder, why all major BSDs (and maybe OpenSolaris) will not create their own x11 fork and bring back quality to x11 then rely on this currently broken shit.

OpenBSD already has Xenocara ...
Because it's a lot of work?

X is not simple, in fact, it's very complicated, making a Xorg fork will take a lot of manpower ...
Also, as far as I understand is, Xenocara is not exactly a fork, but more a set of patches (OpenBSD people will undoubtedly correct me here if I'm wrong and/or provide more details on this)

Quote:
There was also Y Window Server some time ago, totally rewritten x11 replacement, but no one cared ...
Problem is that application will have to be rewritten, it would be a major paradigm shift ...

Quote:
Hi. Can Xfee86 be installed in FreeBSD 7.x (how, ports/package/off the sources)?
XFree is still being maintained, but support for XFree was removed from the ports tree a few months ago -- I believe the version in ports was rather old anyway.
It would be interesting to see if it would work, all the fancy 3D features are not that interesting to many of the BSD people, who mainly prefer stability over performance ...

As for the Linux/Xorg integration ... It seems like a very hypothetical issue that may or may not happen ... I would rather worry about the issues at hand (i.e. Xorg becoming crappy&unstable) rather than the issues that may or may not occur...

And as for ``Linuxism'' in other applications: This is certainly true, but the difference is that a) There are often alternatives for the ``Linuxism apps'', and b) That Xorg is more than just any application, it is a critical part of a desktop system.
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Old 25th May 2009
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Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
o Stupid ``Xlib: extension "Generic Event Extension" missing on display ":0.0".'' warnings, annoying especially because I don't use menus and launch everything from inside xterms (Message is `mostly harmless', but just annoying).
The reason for this warning is rather silly, it's because the X libs support this extension, but it isn't supported by the X server yet ... Modular Xorg better my foot!
The X server does support it now, and has for a while. Have you updated to Xorg 7.4 from the ports tree yet?

Adam
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Old 25th May 2009
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The issue is ``solved'' now, but is was silly that the issue existed in the first place.

It's like shipping an OS with a chmod utility while not supporting file permissions ... :-/
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
What is Xenocara anyway? I know it's Xorg converted to BSDMake (Instead of GNU autotools), but does it also contain fixes and stuff? In other words, is it really different (better) that vanilla Xorg?

Might it be worth trying to build&run Xenocara on FreeBSD?

Xenocara is de facto OpenBSD fork of XOrg. It is heavily patched XOrg which is used on OpenBSD. As you probably know X is more intimately integrated with OpenBSD than FreeBSD. X is not the part of the OpenBSD ports tree like in FreeBSD. You can only select to install X during the OS installation and you have no choice of which parts of X will be installed.
I am almost sure that you can not compile Xenocara on anything else but
OpenBSD.

That is significant for two reasons. Incorrectly configured X server is the source of the greatest security risk on the typical desktop installation. This way X is server is configured by a security competent dedicated OpenBSD/X developer.

Secondly, since the X is in some week sense part of the OpenBSD kernel it is subject to the same standards of OpenBSD. That means that it
is stable as ROCK and works as advertised.

The negative side of above approach is that in terms of X and drivers you
get only the things which are consider by OpenBSD team as stable and usable. XOrg used by OpenBSD is usually one version number behind the XOrg releases.

Common complain by a typical Linux user is that Xenocara doesn't support 3D. That is absolute nonsense. The truth is that 3D is much more stable on OpenBSD than anything else but is limited (particularly on i386 junk) in the scope of the hardware it supports.

For example Xenocara does support accelerated X server on quite a few
SUN video cards but a typical Linux and if you want FreeBSD user couldn't care less about non Wintel Hardware.

Last edited by Oko; 25th May 2009 at 09:38 PM.
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post

And as for ``Linuxism'' in other applications: This is certainly true, but the difference is that a) There are often alternatives for the ``Linuxism apps'', and b) That Xorg is more than just any application, it is a critical part of a desktop system.
As noted above in one of my other posts. A typical OpenBSD desktop user IMHO uses very few Linux specific things. The most annoying for me personally is GCC and GNU tool chain which will hopefully be replaced by
PCC and OpenBSD backed tool chain soon. Groff will be replaced by Nroff
as the part of the same effort. Groff is C++ so it can not be compiled by PCC
even if it was BSD licensed and a good simple implementation of Troff.

The rest of the Desktop stuff in userland really depends from person to person. I already mentioned that personally the only Linuxism I use is mencoder which is part of MPlayer. I could really check but except TeX I have absolutely no other significant parts of the system that are even GPL licensed let alone Linuxism.
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
What is Xenocara anyway? I know it's Xorg converted to BSDMake (Instead of GNU autotools), but does it also contain fixes and stuff? In other words, is it really different (better) that vanilla Xorg?

Might it be worth trying to build&run Xenocara on FreeBSD?
As I said it would be nice to have common code base of a fork between BSDs, but FreeBSD team do not seem to be "interested", IMHO even NetBSD will be closer to OpenBSD model, since you can select x11 sets during install (not the version from pkgsrc).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
Because it's a lot of work?

X is not simple, in fact, it's very complicated, making a Xorg fork will take a lot of manpower ...
Of course its a lot of work, at least at the beginning, but combining man power of all BSD projects does not seem to be such small group.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
Problem is that application will have to be rewritten, it would be a major paradigm shift ...
It lack x11 compatibility layer, if it would contain that, then it would have a lot bigger chances to succeed imho.
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Old 25th May 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by vermaden View Post
As I said it would be nice to have common code base of a fork between BSDs, but FreeBSD team do not seem to be "interested", IMHO even NetBSD will be closer to OpenBSD model, since you can select x11 sets during install (not the version from pkgsrc).
XFree86 was tightly integrated with NetBSD kernel. NetBSD has switched to FreeBSD model when they switched to XOrg on selected architectures.
During FreeBSD installation you can select X. The problem is that version of XOrg is as stable as vanilla XOrg so most users opt out and install the latest and the "greatest" version of XOrg from ports.
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