Originally posted by iniudan
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Have you ever tried running games in Wine and tripped over a crash-inducing bug? It's a similar problem but in your video drivers. The drivers aren't designed to work without X.org so, unless you can fake X.org's ABI convincingly enough to manage initialization and lie about desktop status, you can't use them and, if you make even one mistake in impersonating X.org, the video drivers will crash due to a violated expectation.
(I get the impression you're not a programmer. As a computer science major who's been programming since the age of 8, let me assure you, there's nothing more fragile than native code which only compiled successfully because the compiler was checking against a different implementation than the one you're running with. A crash isn't actually an application saying "I give up!", it's the kernel killing the application for trying to perform an invalid action. For example, a segmentation fault us the application trying to access memory outside what was assigned to it... often at address 0 which is reserved to mean NULL in C.)
To get around that, nVidia, ATi, and Intel would have to make, test, and release custom versions of the drivers... and it would be more work than the XMir patch Intel just rejected. (And probably at least as much work as the MIPS recompile nVidia wanted an arm and a leg for which lost them a 10-million machine bid to ATi in China.)
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