Re: Making Xorg easier to test (was Re: [git pull] drm request 3)

[Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>]

On Fri, 5 Mar 2010 07:53:46 -0800 (PST)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Carlos R. Mafra wrote:
> > 
> > Whereas everytime I wanted to do that with Xorg it was such a pain that
> > I want to keep away from that mess.
> 
> Actually, take it from me: Xorg is _pleasant_ to test these days.
> 
> Ok, so that's partly compared to the mess it _used_ to be, but it's really 
> night and day. The whole build system was so incredibly baroque and heavy 
> that you really had to understand it deeply if you wanted to do anything 
> fancy.
> 
> And the non-fancy alternative was to just build the whole thing, which 
> took _hours_ even on fast machines because the build system overhead was 
> near-infinite (I dunno, maybe parallel builds could be made to work, but 
> it took more brain-power than I could ever put into it).
> 
> These days, there's a few dependencies you need to know about (I do agree 
> that from a user perspective the thing might have been made a bit _too_ 
> modular) but they are generally fairly trivial, and there are scripts to 
> download all the drivers and misc utilities needed.

Just FYI for those following this thread; testing the server and 3D
drivers really isn't too much trouble these days, you can even install
everything into a separate path (I usually choose /opt-gfx-test); you
just need to build libdrm, mesa, xserver and your video driver (along
with an input driver or tw) in that order.  Then just startx
-- /opt/gfx-test/bin/Xorg and put something reasonable in .xinitrc.

Full instructions at http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Development/BuildingX.

--
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center