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  • I may have read your earlier questions as "will we do it", which I'm not able to answer. Questions about "is it possible ?", on the other hand, I *can* answer

    AFAIK the code is either MIT/X11 or dual licensed, so that shouldn't be a problem. I guess it's possible that the kernel devs could band together and declare the API as "GPL only" but I don't think that is likely to happen.

    We already have a good memory manager, so the most we would use from GEM is any API subset we needed to expose in order to let another kernel driver make use of a KMS-managed frame buffer. We would also need to expose the appropriate KMS API bits as you say.

    I think the goal would be to use the existing framebuffer drivers; we could replace them as an alternative to exposing the GEM/KMS API bits but I don't think we would want to go that route.

    The actual modesetting code would probably stay closed-source as it is today, not to protect the register info but to protect some of the proprietary software.

    All that said, it's not clear whether implementing KMS in the fglrx driver is the right thing to do, or whether the endgame for professional graphics is more likely to move modesetting out of the X/DRI stack completely into a separate hypervisor. In that case we would probably just make the fglrx driver hypervisor-aware and hook modesetting that way rather than going with the current KMS approach.

    For clarity, I still think KMS is absolutely the right direction for the open source drivers, and there's a good chance we will need to provide something similar in fglrx. I'm just not sure whether KMS would be the "next step" for fglrx.
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    • Originally posted by bridgman View Post
      I actually like the "glass" part of the Vista UI, but haven't had time to see if there is an equivalent effect I can get on Linux.
      I, and I know for sure a lot of other ATI users too, would really like this to be possible.

      Will it ever be?

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      • It would be a feature added to one of the compositing window managers, not something specific to the driver or the hardware. I think border transparency is available today but the Vista UI adds a bit of diffusion/blurring as well as transparency which looks pretty sharp.
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        • Originally posted by Mr_Ed View Post
          I, and I know for sure a lot of other ATI users too, would really like this to be possible.

          Will it ever be?
          It's available today on KDE4.

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          • Oh good, I'll stop futzing with Compiz then
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            • Originally posted by bridgman View Post
              It would be a feature added to one of the compositing window managers, not something specific to the driver or the hardware. I think border transparency is available today but the Vista UI adds a bit of diffusion/blurring as well as transparency which looks pretty sharp.
              Both Compiz and KWin 4 provide that feature, but it has been broken in fglrx since 8 releases or something...
              EDIT: Ah well, and it (at least in Compiz) requires OpenGL 2, so no solution for you bridgman, sorry

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              • yep i would love to see the blur effect on ati hardware to.

                the kde4 _and_ compiz blur work on nvidia without any problems.

                without this effect transparency is practically useless.

                (intel drivers are effected by the lack of blur too... -> http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Plugins/Blur )

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                • Originally posted by NeoBrain View Post
                  Both Compiz and KWin 4 provide that feature, but it has been broken in fglrx since 8 releases or something...
                  EDIT: Ah well, and it (at least in Compiz) requires OpenGL 2, so no solution for you bridgman, sorry
                  Broken? Or *removed*?

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                  • Originally posted by Mr_Ed View Post
                    Broken? Or *removed*?
                    Transparent window-decorations are a feature of the window-manager, so it can't be removed from the graphics-driver.
                    Originally posted by questioneer View Post
                    yep i would love to see the blur effect on ati hardware to.
                    [...] without this effect transparency is practically useless.
                    Uhm... I'd say _with_ this effect transparency is useless. Isn't it the whole point of transparency to be able to make out the background of a window? So why would you want to blur it?

                    And am I the only one who thinks the Vista window-decorations are extremely ugly? Call me nostalgic but when I'm stuck on a windows-machine I always enable the "classic-look".
                    Last edited by Zhick; 07 March 2009, 06:00 AM.

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                    • Originally posted by Zhick View Post
                      Uhm... I'd say _with_ this effect transparency is useless. Isn't it the whole point of transparency to be able to make out the background of a window? So why would you want to blur it?

                      Imagine a transparent window bar over another windowbar, the text doesnt look too nice with another text at the back shining through.

                      and ofc you can make out whats in the background even if its blurred, its not like transparency is used to read text in the background...

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