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RE: Win32 version of XFree86


Hi Suhaib,

> Well then you could just write a devices driver and some code
> which uses this driver.  The code goes into
> Xserver/hw/xfree86/win32 and that would BE IT!!!. 

That sounds really cool. All we need to do then is build a chipset 
driver that runs on top of DirectX. I am very familiar with DirectX, 
so I can probably whip that up quickly.

What about event handling stuff? Has that already been implemented 
(using DirectInput or some other mechanism)?

> There is really no need for you guys to restart the stuff from
> scratch.  I had works on the code for several months spending
> several hours a day and if you trust it is in quite good shap for
> Cygwin/Win32 platform. 

I have no intention of starting from scratch if you have already done 
all the ground work. I am sure that Rich feels the same way also ;-)

> > Cool! So you have patched sources for raw X11R6.4? I know that is
> > what Rich was starting to work on, although we want to build it all
> > with Microsoft Visual C++ and Borland C++ instead of Gygwin. Have you
> > done any work to get these compilers to work at all?
> 
> If you intend to spend a year re-writing code and assembly code
> (total 30 MB) in Xserver and its subdirectories, you are welcome to
> try MSVC or Borland.    

I thought the X11R6.4 source tree was C code only since it can 
compile for non-intel CPU's? What assembler code is present in the 
code, and is it localised at all? More specifically if the assembler 
code is just in chipset drivers, we can throw those away since we 
don't need that (DirectX becomes the chipset driver).

> The Win32 code in X11R6.x source tree, for libs only, is for MSVC
> 4.0 and it cannot be compiled even with MSVC 5.0 or 6.0.  You would
> be undertaking a mega project which you may not be able to finish. 

Certainly getting it all working with GCC first is a more desireable 
option then, but I would like to be able to build with MSVC and other 
Win32 compilers because they produce much better code than GCC does 
(although 2.9.5 may be better now).

> MASMS cannot deal with assembly code for various graphics cards in
> Xserver/hw/xfree86 and its subdirectories.  It will return i386
> syntex error for literally every line of the assembly code.  

Sure, but we don't need *any* of that code to be compiled for the 
Win32 version, since we don't be doing any chipset specific code. All 
the code to talk to the hardware will be going via DirectX.

> I gave it a shot and i would prefer to keep my hands off from MSVC.
> I am not a programmer who could write 10s of MB of assembly code
> in Micro$oft impossed language. 

Actually the assembler code in XFree86 is supposed to be portable to 
non-GCC compilers, but perhaps it isn't. I thought there was some 
kind of assyntax.h header file that would allow the code to be 
converted into MASM assembler code.

But like I said, we can probably remove 95% of the assembler code 
problems since a lot of it may just be in the chipset drivers. Unless 
of course gobs of it are in the cfb code?

Regards,


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