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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!umix!oxtrap!rich
From: rich@oxtrap.UUCP (K. Richard Magill)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general,comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: X Windows on a 3B1 (let's do it)
Message-ID: <2777@oxtrap.UUCP>
Date: 9 Feb 88 00:40:06 GMT
References: <1686@codas.att.com> <3686@megaron.arizona.edu> <384@pcbox.UUCP>
Reply-To: rich@oxtrap.UUCP (K. Richard Magill)
Organization: Oxford, Ann Arbor
Lines: 41

In article <384@pcbox.UUCP> pjc@pcbox.UUCP (Paul J. Condie) writes:
>In article <3686@megaron.arizona.edu> lm@megaron.arizona.edu.UUCP (Larry McVoy) writes:
>>In article <1686@codas.att.com> mikel@codas.att.com (Mikel Manitius) writes:
>>>Has anyone tried to port, or know of anyone that has, X Windows onto a
>>>3B1? I've got my hands on X.V11R1, and am thinking about looking into
>>>doing the port myself. Ideas?
>>Uh huh.  Right.  It's only umpteen million lines of code that depends heavily
>>upon BSD system calls.  Good luck.
>yea, let us know when you're done.

I'm ready.

I have all the info I need to do it but I could use some help.  If
anyone wants to help, how about if I coordinate and/or start a mailing
list.  I have a list of subprojects and research that need to be done.

Eg, Should we really build an X server over the window device driver?
(this means lots of ioctl's to write to the screen and prevents the
use of a meta key)

Eg, I know the addresses of the status and data registers of the
keyboard but I don't know the layout of the status register nor the
protocol for dealing with the keyboard.  This could be figured out
by a) asking someone who knows, b) disassembling pieces of the window
driver, (awkward, cause its big), c) prodding at hardware, d) monty
carlo, that is, try something until it works, or e) something I
haven't thought of.

a) requires contacts that I don't have.
c) requires hardware that I don't have.

Which leaves me only c) and d).

Eg, we really want something like a frame buffer which means a
specialized device driver, (not hard), which means replacing the
window driver (a little scary) which means replacing /dev/console with
some other driver which is at least a glass tty.

Eg, if we want a frame buffer, how to we get system address space
mapped into user space?  Can we ask the sysVipc shared memory to start
at a specified place?  Can we sysVipc shared memory and tease the
virtual memory system into remapping?