Half-Way Point

Well, today marks 50% completion of this 50-day ATI Linux trial. With that, there is a quote to pass along from Egbert Eich -- an X developer, SuSE X maintainer, and X.Org board member. Below are a few excerpts from Egbert's presentation at FOSDEM 2006. The slides are available here.

Why restrict us of video drivers to X?

- There may be other consumers for a video driver

- Currently driver infrastucture is married intimately with the Xserver

- Most data is collected at server startup time

- modification of the data during the lifetime of a server is not modifiable

- No graphics device hot plugging

- No mode list changes: No display hotplugging

What is interesting to point out is many of those items that were discussed by Mr. Eich have been ATI's recent aims with the Linux fglrx drivers when it comes to aticonfig and the dynamic display management options, etc... From the other side, NVIDIA has yet to implement any of those features, nor have any green sources yet commented.