alanc @ sun.com

What programmers look like...

Apparently, programmers look like me & Gary, according the Flickr title Alec put on the snapshot of us in his photos from last week's Sun Security Ambassador beerbash. At least I didn't get caught in a funny hat like the distinguished gentleman to our right (who was actually only a couple feet to our right when the photo was taken):

There's nothing like realizing you're surrounded by one of the inventors of public-key crypto and the architects of Trusted Solaris, having your photo taken by the developer of Crack, to make a X guy feel like he stepped into the wrong party. Though I wasn't feeling out of place for long, since just before Jim came down the hall and summoned me with the magic words “Free Beer” I had been working on the putback for the Xorg 7.2 vs. Trusted Extensions bug I'd been working on most of the week, so was answering questions about that, and then I got to meet a whole bunch of people who responded with “Oh! I know your posts on the [Sun internal] security-interest list.” In the end, I was once again feeling lucky to be able to work with such an amazing collection of talented and friendly engineers.

[If you couldn't tell, I'm the one just starting to show grey in his beard - or the one who is in most need of a trip to the gym. Maybe I should try Gman's new workout plan.]

Posted at 11:43PM Feb 19, 2007 by Alan Coopersmith in Sun  | 

Moving x86 video drivers into the kernel

Since Keith's recent talk on X at linux.conf.au, I've been asked a few times and seen discussion elsewhere (such as in the comments on the linked article) what Sun thinks about moving various portions of the Xorg video drivers from the current userspace shared objects into true kernel drivers, as most people assume this means Linux kernel drivers and reducing the portability of Xorg to non-Linux platforms such as Solaris/OpenSolaris and the BSD's.

While I'm of course too far down the food chain to claim to speak officially for Sun, as the lead engineer for the Xorg integration to Solaris and someone who has talked to a number of the other Solaris engineers about it, I'd say the Solaris engineering teams agree having in-kernel drivers for video cards is something we want and need.

On Solaris, we've long had in kernel graphics drivers for all our SPARC frame buffers, since that was a small and controlled set, and writing the driver for it was simply part of the cost of producing the card. On the x86 side though, we had for years the same model as most other x86 Unix-like OS'es - a generic set of kernel modules, and all device-specific logic in the X server. The Solaris x86 kernel modules were vgatext and xsvc. vgatext provides the text console, using standard/ancient VGA interfaces which virtually all PC graphics boards support. xsvc (which was closed source due to legal encumberances, but has recently been replaced with a newly written open source version by the Solaris Xen project team) provides the mappings to the PCI bus that allow Xorg to probe the bus hardware to find devices, and then map in the video card once it's found.

Recently, new kernel modules have started appearing in Solaris - the first two for 3-D rendering acceleration, nvidia's driver and the DRI driver for Intel graphics. Two more are coming soon from the Suspend-and-Resume project, to provide the hooks to save and restore necessary state across system suspends - they'll initially support the ATI Rage XL from the Sun Ultra 20 and ATI ES-1000 in the Ultra 20 M2. (Dave and Jay gave a talk on their implementation at last years' X Developer's Conference.)

Additionally, our security guys have been pushing for more kernel frame buffer drivers to reduce our need for running Xorg as root. They'd also like to find a way to close the now infamous Ring 0 security weakness. (We've invited them to drop in to this week's X.Org Developer's Conference to talk about this - they're planning to show up Thursday morning for the Secure X talk, so we may try to have a breakout session on this topic at that time to discuss this.)

Now, we still can't write drivers ourselves for every x86 video card on the market, which is one of the big reasons we chose to move from Xsun to Xorg on Solaris, so we'd still prefer if a model could be found that allowed sharing drivers between Solaris, Linux, and BSD (which means agreeing on both licensing and interfaces with the kernel), similar to what we already have in DRI. If we can work out a model like that, then I think Sun would support it - either way, we're going to have to have more graphics driver functionality in the kernel, and sharing would be better than going our own way.

[Technorati Tags: Xorg, X11, drivers, kernel, Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris]

Posted at 10:32PM Feb 04, 2007 by Alan Coopersmith in X11  |  Comments[4]