BETA drivers for X-independent OpenGL?

[mklemm]

Hi,

this is mainly a question to the NVIDIA representatives who might occasionally have a look into this forum...

In several publications of on-line information technology journals there are statements that implicate that NVIDIA has released a Beta driver that supports OpenGL graphics independently of the X-Window system, i.e. in the way that is required for the X.Org Xegl project as a base architecture.

a) Is this statement true?
b) If so, where can I download these drivers?
c) If not, what are the plans wrt support for this new driver architecture? Is there any official or non-official statement by NVIDIA regarding this topic?

Thank you, and keep up the good work!

[Lithorus]

Originally Posted by mklemm

Hi,

this is mainly a question to the NVIDIA representatives who might occasionally have a look into this forum...

In several publications of on-line information technology journals there are statements that implicate that NVIDIA has released a Beta driver that supports OpenGL graphics independently of the X-Window system, i.e. in the way that is required for the X.Org Xegl project as a base architecture.

a) Is this statement true?
b) If so, where can I download these drivers?
c) If not, what are the plans wrt support for this new driver architecture? Is there any official or non-official statement by NVIDIA regarding this topic?

Thank you, and keep up the good work!

Perhaps you are refering to the beta drivers which provides texture-from-pixmap and can work with Beryl without using XGL. (well, actually the feature is also in the non-beta drivers.)

Do you have any links of those journals.

[mklemm]

Originally Posted by Lithorus

Perhaps you are refering to the beta drivers which provides texture-from-pixmap and can work with Beryl without using XGL. (well, actually the feature is also in the non-beta drivers.)

Do you have any links of those journals.

Unfortunately, I do not remember the links, but one was the german Wikipedia entry for "Xgl", and another one was a german Xgl user group WIKI, and I also remember an interview with a Trolltech QT developer, who also was mentioning something like this.

If it is what you are referring to, this would be a little bit of a disappointment for me, since I already know these beta drivers, and they are not what I was looking for. I was referring to a driver that would work like the Mesa-fbdev resp. Mesa-Solo OpenGL implementation, which provides hardware acceleratet (through DRI) OpenGL without having to install the X-Window system.

The Xegl project uses this to implement the EGL API and on top of it a Xgl-like X-Server, so in the future you won't have to have Xgl running inside another X-Server. What is best and unique to the Xegl solution is that it seperates the concerns of the Windowing system from the hardware driver aspects cleanly, and thus is an architectural superior approch above integrating hardware drivers into the windowing system, as it is done now.

I just was thinking that NVIDIA already has released drivers for that, but if your statement is true, this doesn't seem to be the case...

For a more comprehensive discussion about this topic, see this thread (quite old, but still an open issue).

[Thunderbird]

Nvidia doesn't provide drivers like this. If you are interested in things like this you could help the nouveau guys which are working on an opensource video driver for nvidia cards with 3d support. These drivers could perhaps be ported.

[Lithorus]

Originally Posted by mklemm

Unfortunately, I do not remember the links, but one was the german Wikipedia entry for "Xgl", and another one was a german Xgl user group WIKI, and I also remember an interview with a Trolltech QT developer, who also was mentioning something like this.

If it is what you are referring to, this would be a little bit of a disappointment for me, since I already know these beta drivers, and they are not what I was looking for. I was referring to a driver that would work like the Mesa-fbdev resp. Mesa-Solo OpenGL implementation, which provides hardware acceleratet (through DRI) OpenGL without having to install the X-Window system.

The Xegl project uses this to implement the EGL API and on top of it a Xgl-like X-Server, so in the future you won't have to have Xgl running inside another X-Server. What is best and unique to the Xegl solution is that it seperates the concerns of the Windowing system from the hardware driver aspects cleanly, and thus is an architectural superior approch above integrating hardware drivers into the windowing system, as it is done now.

I just was thinking that NVIDIA already has released drivers for that, but if your statement is true, this doesn't seem to be the case...

For a more comprehensive discussion about this topic, see this thread (quite old, but still an open issue).

Like I mentioned before the texture-from-pixmap is now supported which means that you can have something like Beryl running without the need to have an Xgl server running on top of another X server. It's part of the Xorg 7.1 spec AFAIK. The nvidia driver doesn't not however support AiGLX completely, but enough to have Beryl running.

EGL's purpose is much more than just having Xgl running without another X server. It's main purpose is to replace GLX.

But the whole XGL/AiGLX/XGLX/XEGL are many times mis-used.