--- James Simmons <jsimmons@infradead.org> wrote:

quoted

2) Ben suggestion that we mount userland inside the kernel during early 
   boot and use a userland library. If we would use a library then it MUST 
   be OpenGL. This would be the forced standard on all platforms. This 
   would mean Mesa would be needed to build the kernel. We could move over 
   Mesa into the kernel like zlib is in the tree right now.

It is not true that it must be OpenGL. The suggestion is for an independent
library that would support mode setting and cursor control. Actually OpenGL does
not specify an API for these things, we would need to develop one.

But broader issues are at work. Microsoft has decided to recode all graphics in
Longhorn to use Direct3D. This was done to get at the performance gains provided
by D3D and hardware accelerated graphics. For example a Cairo implementation hat
uses X rendering vs Cairo on OpenGL was benchmarked at being a 100:1 faster.

A proposal has been made that OpenGL be promoted as the primary base graphics
API on Linux. Then things like Cairo and the xserver be implemented on top of
OpenGL.

1) OpenGL is the only fully accelerated API that Linux has. We don't have D3D or
anything else like it. Fully accelerated interfaces are a pain to build and it
would stupid to do another one.