On Nov 13, 11:51am, Amit Gupta wrote:
> Subject: Re: ARM Linux
> On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, Robert Black wrote:
>
> > > P.S. my favourite quote from Acorn World 96 :
> > >
> > > [Me] "So, Russell, how long did it take you to get X11R6 running on ARM
> > > Linux ?"
> > >
> > > [Russ] "About a week - but most of that was compile time."
> >
> > Sounds about right. Thats roughly how long it took me to go from no Xarm to
> > having a minimal working Xarm (and most of that was compile time).
Admittedly
> > Scott & Jo did the horrific work of typing in the keymap.
>
> Out of interest, roughly what is involved in porting the X server to a
> specific architecture ? I would have guessed that a lot of low-level
> graphics code (line drawing, scrolling etc.) would be platform dependent,
> and that the task would therefore be extremely time-consuming.

Yes and no. It is pretty simple to get a minimalist 8bpp version of X up and
running. There are machine-independant routines for doing most things. It is
when you want to do things like switching virtual terminals that things get
hairy. If your console driver looks sufficiently like another supported
machine's console you may be able to get X to compile out-of-the-box.
Unfortunately the RiscBSD console driver looks like nothing else on the planet
;-)

Cheers

Rob

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