[desktop-discuss] Some Xorg 7.1 and Xgl stuff

[Moinak Ghosh]

Hi Folks,

   I have been playing around with Xorg 7.1 for the past few days and have
managed to compile Xorg 7.1 in it's entirety on OpenSolaris B48 and it 
appears
to start up okay. Though I have not yet put it through the paces.
There are issues however. Here's a summary:

-- Build issues --
* The 7.1 modular tree appears to be a bit broken even while compiling 
with gcc
  on B48. I had to make code changes to several places in the Xserver 
and a few
  video drivers.

* The build documentation is poor and one new build script appears to 
have been
  only tested on Linux using bash. Something I do not like is that one 
needs
  both the 7.0 and 7.1 tarballs since 7.1 only includes a subset of the 
tarballs that
  have changed from 7.0. Then there is a guile script (!!) that merges 
the two.
  I do not have guile and do not intend to install it for the sake of a 
silly script.
  So I ignored the guile script and cooked up my own shell script.

* The overall build script required several changes. Some of the generated
  Makefiles were improper and needed manual tweaking. I have also modified
  the "build-from-tarballs" script to be able to merge in patch sets.

* The Xserver module from 7.1 tree appears to be inconsistent! I had to 
grab
  the CVS HEAD. In particular Xgl refers to Xserver functionality that 
is only
  present in the CVS tree.

-- Other problems --
* Xorg works but Xorg -configure wedges up the console.

* I could not build AIGLX since it has a hard dependency on DRI. Xgl builds
  however after several source-level tweaks.

* Upon startup Xgl exited with a segv but did not dump core. It works fine
  and initializes a 3D surface when run from GDB! So this looks like a 
race.

Once these issues are sorted I plan to check whether the Nvidia driver works
with 7.1 as claimed in the documentation. It works now on BeleniX with Xorg
6.9 and will be bundled in the next release. Xfce 4.4 has some nice 
composite
effects like window shadow, panel highlight, transparency which were tested
without and performance or other issues on a GeForce 6600.

Regards,
Moinak.