From: David Waite <mass@ufl.edu>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 17:35:34 -0500

RE: Matrox G200 specs released!

> > I would suggest writing a libggi3d driver and then working on a libggi3d
> > target for Mesa.  This might take a little longer than hardwiring  the
> > support directly into Mesa, but is the most flexible in the long run.
> > BTW, It is called just Mesa, not MesaGL.  Evidently SGI is a little
> > squeamish about people tacking GL on a product that is not really
> > affiliated with OpenGL.  Brian Paul has requested that people refer to
> > it as Mesa (not MesaGL).
>
> Yeah, I remembered the correct term after I wrote this, I was just so
> excited I didn't think about it ;)
>
> How far along is libggi3d now, is it even usable?
>
> I was thinking more along the lines of having the GLX extensions use ggi3d
> as a backend and have Mesa do rendering through GLX. I think it
> would allow
> a wider range of hardware to be accelerated through mesa although
> I'm not an
> expert by any means, none of this is actually laid out yet. Any ideas?
>
> /-----------------------------------------------------------\
> |Stephen Crowley      stephenc@wf.net, crow@debian.org      |
> |Debian GNU/Linux     http://www.debian.org                 |
> |GPG Key              http://va.debian.org/~crow/public.key |
> \--- 8A8B 3B82 6EA7 CF4E 01A5  5B21 B378 981D D2E1 0D85 ----/
>

I know I would prefer to just expose all the hardware to user space (that
can be done securely), then writing Mesa and libggi3d support seperate. I
haven't looked extensively on libggi3d (as last I checked it wasn't close to
being finished, and I know that Jon stopped working on it with the Creative
job looming), but I cannot see how adding an uneccessary layer of
abstraction to the Mesa driver would be a benefit.

Of course, this is all talk, as I haven't looked at a bit of Mesa source
code since long before even 3dfx hardware support was added, and I don't
even own a G200 yet (although I am reading over the specifications for it,
quickly.)

-David Waite