re: Alternative X11 drivers

[rjs%fdy2.co.uk@localhost]

"matthew green" <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost> wrote:
> rjs%fdy2.co.uk@localhost writes:
>> We have two versions of radeon driver in the tree, which one gets built
>> is
>> selected by a make variable.
>>
>> I have been working on getting an older intel driver working too, I have
>> been
>> building it as well as the existing one.
>>
>> I think I prefer to have both built and rename the driver files so that
>> X11
>> finds the one I want but it is probably best to follow the same pattern
>> for
>> radeon and intel.
>>
>> What do people think ?
>
> ideally, building all and having it easily selectable would be nice,
> and i think this would be best done by having them selected via he
> symlink.  eg, radeon_drv.so -> so.[67], depending on what you want.

A problem with the intel driver is that everything uses a major version
of 2.

> however, doing this was a kind of pain in the build system, and it
> also needed some tool for selecting.
>
> i pretty much abandoned trying to give them different names, as that
> requires patching the server itself to know which to choose and when,
> and the internal names seemed somewhat non-trivial to change.

I have just built my new (old) intel driver as intel_drv_old.so.2 and
rename it to intel_drv.so.2 and recreate the symlink on the one system
that needs it.

> ie, i agree that what we have for radeon isn't optimimal, but there
> are reasons for it being this way.
>
> if you can solve all these issues without too many major changes,
> i'd much rather have them all handily built.

I don't know that I have really solved your issues, it just seems a
bit easier to switch drivers for someone who knows what they are doing.

I would be fine with the old radeon driver getting built as something
like radeon_old_drv.so.6.

The one thing I haven't tried yet is whether specifying a different
name for a renamed driver in xorg.conf will find the right thing.

Robert Swindells