[csw-maintainers] bad news on the CSW X11 front

[Philip Brown]

To translate James's reply to Peter's question, below:


On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org> wrote:
>
>
> Now, tell me: if I'm using the X11 provided with Solaris 10 have I a 3d
> acceleration on those graphic cards where that feature it's available?

"yes".

Presuming that you are using an application that also links to libGL,
which is the library that provides the actual 3d acceleration.

There is zero 3d acceleration, in any raw "libX11.so". from anywhere.
You need a hardware-aware libGL.so, to get 3d acceleration, from any
solaris app.

We get hardware-accelerated libGL.so on solaris, from sun/nvidia.
There is no other reasonably modern source for such a beast.

That libGL.so requires "libX11.so.4".

This is the fundamental problem. since our recent "new X11" stuff, generates a
"libX11.so.6", not libX11.so.4.


So, as mentioned before, our "new X11" stuff, is incompatible with 3d
hardware acceleration on solaris.

Please keep in mind that the primary reason we aimed for "new X11",
was primarily to jump our GNOME stuff ahead, from 2.12, to 2.16.  It's
not that we really need "new X11" in and of itself.

So us not having "new X11" isnt particularly bad, as long as we can
have a "new ENOUGH" set of gnome libs.

Yes, this wont hold us forever. but everything changes over time.
While this wont be good enough in 2 years... what is provided by
solaris itself will have changed in 2 years also, I wouuld guess.
An intermediate "gnome 2.14" solution should serve us well for the
next 12 months.
After 12 months, we re-evaluate.