Re: X problem on PMAGB-B

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I wonder what happened to the X support in the later releases?

At a guess, the peecee world, in the form of X.org, happened to it.

I use X11R6.4 patchlevel 3 - MIT X - under 1.4T on my SPARCs.  I also
use X11R7 from xsrc - X.org - on 4.0.1 and 5.2 on amd64 and i386.

In my view, between the former and the latter, X lost a lot of its
generality, becoming, on non-{amd64,i386} hardware, XFree86 twisted and
bent until it kinda-sort-mostly fits the hardware.  (As a simple
example, on SPARC the X.org code does its own SBus enumeration.  This
would be completely unnecessary except that, apparently, the design is
so deeply wedded to the peecee world, where it does its own PCI
enumeration as a way of making up for the lack-of-design disaster that
peecee videop is, that someone thought it better to do that rather than
to keep the original - mostly sane - MIT X design.)

"Modern" X has lost a lot of its generality it other respects too.
Clients these days seem to blindly assume they're talking to a peecee
server, all the way from things like "use PageUp and PageDown" without
realizing that the user's keyboard might not _have_ any such keys to
things like assuming, without checking, that they know the sizes and
locations of the primary fields within a TrueColor pixel to things like
assuming the channel between client and server is effectively infinite
bandwidth (just try to use a modern Web browser over X forwarded over
long-haul ssh).

It would not surprise me a bit if this involved breaking your PMAGB-B
support.  After all, it's not a peecee running Linux, so nobody cares
about it, right?

If the PMAGB-B presents a linear dumb framebuffer view, I feel
confident MIT X will work out of the box or with only minimal fiddling.
(But then, this is coming from someone who has built his own ddx layers
for two different framebuffers, so my "minimal fiddling" may involve
more hackery than most people are prepared to get into.)

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