From: Torgeir Veimo <Torgeir.Veimo@vertech.no>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 11:00:57 +0000

Re: 3d

Martin Hess wrote:
> 
> I am thinking about helping with the 3d part of GGI. Specifically I would
> like to support the Matrox G200.
> 
> Where do things stand today on the 3d front? I didn't find anything in the
> sources. Is development active? Is there a strategy in place?

The strategy is to not have any strategy! :o)

Well, sreiously speaking. As it stand today, a kgi driver would
implement the necessary logic to virtualize access to the hw so that an
accelerated 3D library such as Mesa (with hw specific drivers) could
access the hardware simultanously with the X server.

You would then implement complete 3D support using Mesa (or whatever you
desire, libggi3d). 

Nothing of this is done yet. You will have to plunge into unknown water.
There exist a Mesa GGI driver though. It will be usefull as a first
step. There is some code in the SGI Linux port to facilitate virtualized
direct access, but it uses MMIO page faults as access control mechanism,
which is _BAAD_. (Linus says so.. ;o)

Some guides on the way:

http://reality.sgi.com/mjk/direct/direct.html
http://reality.sgi.com/mjk/multirender/multirender.html
http://www.wksoftware.com/publications/mcd_icd.html (not much, but
differentiates mcd vs icd)

+ anything on http://reality.sgi.com/opengl/ under the section on
implementation information..

Please don't bring up any discussion about what API to use. First
implement, then discuss..

-- 
-Torgeir