A Question About the Direction of DragonFly BSD

Gregory Gelfond grisha.gelfond at gmail.com
Fri Sep 2 11:18:30 PDT 2005


Dear Sir,

I'm not entirely sure if this is the proper forum in which to ask this
question, so I thought I would ask it here since at least on a surface
level it seems kernel related.

I have a great deal of admiration for what you guys are
attempting/succeeding to accomplish.  From what I understand the
genesis of the project was to "fix everything that FreeBSD is doing
wrong" especially with regards to SMP, but in other areas as well.
One thing that has confused me from the beginning about Unixes in
general is that there a great many ways of drawing objects (text and
other data to the screen).  Linux has the framebuffer, X, there is
DirectFB and other projects which are summarized here:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html

Since so many other areas of the system are being reimplemented via
more elegant solutions I was wondering if there were any plans to take
a step back and look at the os level facilities for abstractions of
video hardware, and reworking them along the same lines as the rest of
the system.  For example providing a Plan 9 like file based interface
to the graphics card/screen.

I apologize if this is the wrong forum for asking this question,
Gregory Gelfond






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