On Tue, Oct 19, 1999 at 10:29:20AM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> > I think I've secured a spare AlphaPC164 to look into this a bit more
> > seriously.  If I recall (without checking up in the archives), the
> > problems with XFree86 have been "we (NetBSD) don't just want to make
> > the VGA card look like a PC to XFree like some other Un*x clones do,
> > we want a nice MI interface"?
> 
> I've never understood why NetBSD persists in trying to use XFree86 on
> non-x86 machines.  It seems to me that this is exactly the problem

Because it is the _only_ X server _at all_ for most of the myriad graphics
chipsets out there which are commonly found in PCs?

It is difficult to buy a PCI (or AGP) video card these days for
which there is any X server which is not XFree, or at least descended,
like XFree is, from X386.  Does XFree suck?  Well, yeah, kinda --
this "I can always just inb/outb, right?" and "all the world is 32
bits with one bus and all devices are directly mapped into memory,
right?" stuff is a crock -- but it's also the only game in town.
Or were you volunteering to write portable or alpha-specific DDX
code for the Mach64, S3, S3V, Matrox, i710, I128, 3DLabs, NVIDIA,
ETx000, and the rest of the cast of thousands?