On Wed, 28 Dec 2016, Michael wrote:
NetBSD is just about the only OS still using xorg as setuid root. Pretty much everyone else did away with it.We only really need it for /dev/pci*, because that lets you mmap() arbitrary PCI space - things like wsfb or sbus graphics work without it.
I'm curious. If you have time, can you explain why those work without it? I'm assuming wsfb because it's in the kernel already and sbus because it has some kind of smarter & more magical method versus PCI ?
We could easily do away with it by going back to using ttyE*, ttyF* etc. - that would only allow using graphics hardware with kernel drivers though. I did that back in the xf86 days,
As a user, I had zero problem with that.
that way every graphics device shows up as its own PCI domain, device 0:0:0, complete with its own IO space, which can be quite confusing since it doesn't correspond to the actual bus layout at all.
That makese sense. As a developer, I always hate big lookup tables and TLB-like abstractions. They are helpful, but usually a bit obtuse to work with.
-Swift