On Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 12:57:55AM +0000, David Johnson wrote: | ... I think a major problem for Linux is forward and | backward compatibility issues and compatibility issues between | distributions. ...
There are (at least) two issues here: Binary compatibility for applications, and binary compatibility for driver interfaces (including kernel-resident, X, and client-side 3D drivers, in the case of DRI). Binary compatibility at the driver level is an extremely difficult problem given the variation in hardware across vendors (and even across multiple generations of cards from the same vendor). The DRI people have been working on it. However, unless the vendors providing closed-source solutions eventually agree to a common open infrastructure, there will never be perfect compatibility across vendors. Binary compatibility at the application level is also hard, but doable. For 3D, a Linux OpenGL compatibility standard already exists, and I believe all OpenGL implementations released within roughly the past year conform to it. Most of the complaints in the current thread seem to be focused on application compatibility, so I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that problem has largely been solved. Allen _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
