Day 2: Conferences: Accelerated OpenGL for Linux and XFree86

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This talk was done by Jon Leech from SGI and Frank LaMonica from Precision Insight.
Jon gave an introduction to OpenGL, explaining what the different components where, and how they fit together. You can see more details in his slides which are in the middle of the picture gallery

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Then, he handed out the crowd to Frank LaMonica who gave the status on Precision Insight's work on integrating OpenGL in XFree 4.0.

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Some of the points Frank mentioned were (and that you can see in his slides) were:

They have a lot of work to do in a relative short period of time, and it influenced some of their design decisions, like not trying to be too fancy at first, and go for solutions that less likely to crash and easier to debug
They also decided to have as little in the kernel as possible. It's not only to please Linus, but also because they agree with him that not only it's bad to bloat the kernel, but also when you do have bugs, you're much better off if your bug occurs in user code and doesn't take the whole kernel down.
They have a first alpha implementation that they're showing in the Red Hat booth (quake in a window with a 3DLabs card). They're planning to have source code ready for release by the end of June for inclusion in XFree86 4.0
The people who really deserve credit are: Brian Paul, the author of Mesa who agreed to relicense Mesa under the BSD license (so that it could be combined with XFree86), Red Hat and SGI for serious funding, SGI for GLX and invaluable technical advise, and of course the XFree86 team.

Frank's company, PI (Precision Insight), has been hiring talented people, and added Daryll Strauss, the 3D linux man (with his work on accelerated 3D drivers for 3DFX cards), to the team recently.
You can see the whole PI team here:

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From left to right: Kevin Martin, Rik Faith, Allen Akin, Jens Owen, Daryll Strauss, Frank LaMonica, and Jon Leech (from SGI)

I'd like to thank the entire team, and especially Frank for being so instrumental in making all this happen in the first place.

Picture library

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99/05/20 (11:26): Version 1.0