Frank van der Linden (frank@fwi.uva.nl) wrote:

: In a Perfect World, the kernel should take care of the actual low-level
: device-driving, not the X server. Kernel bloat might be avoided by
: having a basic VGA driver in the kernel, and loading an LKM for the
: right video card once you need to get more out of it.
: 
: The problem is, that it would be a big effort to keep track of all available
: cards. Currently, the XFree86 folks do it for us, I am not complaining ;-)

There is also an performance issue: you don't want to have, say, one syscall
overhead for each blitter call, if the blitter is fast. We've had the same
discussion for the Amiga X servers. While, in principle, there are
ioctls defined (but not implemented) for sprite cursor use and blitting,
none of the graphics drivers cares to implement them.

Regards,
	Ignatios Souvatzis