Hi, Stephan wrote:
having messages, ports and such has noting to do with X, you can have them without. In fact, I have all that with GNUstep, with or without X. GNUstep can run on X, it is convenient since all the handling of the video driver is done for you, but there is no problem in running the same on Windows which has not. The applications do not notice that and do not need that.I´m not the first one with this idea and there was a project called cosmoe which had the goal of porting the Haiku userland to a Posix kernel (well, actually, Linux). BeOS/Haiku has some own IPC primitives (ports and messages for instance) which are unknown to Posix. Cosmoe is trying to emulate these through shared memory and SysV semaphores. I think this is a good base for a prototype.
It is easy also to write a framebuffer backend and it has been done. Though framebuffer are different from unix to unix and then you need to handle acceeration, resolution and all that stuff which, admittedly, X11 handles in an overblown way (dri, xrandr, etc), but handles for you.
Examples for a dedicated display for the GNUstep concept can be found both in the original NeXT display post script as well as in today's Mac.
The real problem is having efficient, stable and integrated applications. Thes can be done while running on X11. Writing something novel would give you something nice, but without substance.
Riccardo