Re: Ubuntu plans for Natty release

[Michel Dänzer <daenzer@debian.org>]

On Fre, 2010-11-12 at 12:32 +1100, Christopher James Halse Rogers
wrote: 
> On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 13:06 +0100, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> > On Don, 2010-11-11 at 12:26 +1100, Christopher James Halse Rogers
> > wrote: 
> > 
> > > Can you see an easy solution which allows changes during X's runtime and
> > > will handle UMS transparently?
> > 
> > One possibility would be an r[36]00_dri.so wrapper which can pass
> > through to the classic or Gallium drivers based on KMS vs. UMS and
> > configuration via environment variables and/or configuration files. This
> > might be appropriate for upstream as well.
> > 
> That sounds an awful lot like work :).

I've thought of a simpler possible solution:

      * Fix the Gallium drivers to bail gracefully instead of crashing
        with UMS (this will need to happen anyway). 
      * Ship the classic and Gallium drivers in separate directories and
        set the libGL search path such that the two directories will be
        tried one after another.

r300g would be in the first directory searched. With UMS, it would fail
to initialize, and libGL would pick up r300 from the second directory.

This solution would also allow overriding the default driver with
$LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH.

I really hope you don't have to stick with your ugly X driver patch. :}


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |                http://www.vmware.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer