On Sun, 8 Feb 2009, Michael wrote:
Is moving to X11R7 a good time to make X11 sharable per machine_arch rather than per port? At the moment only amd64, i386, macppc, shark, & sparc64 have moved across, so...Should work for the client stuff at least. The only incompatibility I can think of right now is the way we mmap (PCI) IO space on powerpc and shark - by picking a magic address range which isn't used by any PCI device, on macppc it's 0xf2000000 ( traditionally the 1st PCI bridge's IO range ), prep and ofppc use different values, they're currently #defined in sys/params.h so there are no magic values or #ifdefs in the Xserver. We could just add an ioctl so the Xserver can ask the kernel where it would find IO space, that would take a few clock cycles more during setup but the result would be the same and Xservers would be compatible across $MACHINE_ARCH.
Is there any sense in adding it to the information exported by
/dev/fb? (I expect "no" is the answer here, but just checking).
Having the kernel report the value definitely seems the cleanest
option - it would allow new ports to just use an existing Xwsfb
without needing to rebuild anything on the X side.
Another option might be to provide it via a machdep sysctl value?
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