Erik Reid has been working on adding DRI support for NetBSD. Direct Rendering Infrastructure, also known as the DRI, is a framework for allowing direct access to graphics hardware in a safe and efficient manner. Some of Erik's work has been imported into XFree86 4.3.0 which is now in xsrc tree. He has subsequently put together a fairly large patch which compiles and works on his NetBSD/i386 1.6P system with a matrox g450. Try out the patch and give him some feedback!

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Subject: XFree86 DRI on NetBSD
To: None <tech-x11@netbsd.org>
From: Erik Reid <reide@canuck.com>
List: tech-x11
Date: 03/19/2003 02:10:10

Hi there. For those that are interested, I've slowly been working on adding DRI
support for NetBSD in the DRI project's CVS repository. A bunch, but not all, of
this work got imported into 4.3.0. Now that 4.3.0 is in xsrc tree, I think we
should bring in what's left of the changes to make it work properly, since there's
not much that's missing.

I've put together a fairly large patch which makes it all compile and work on
my NetBSD/i386 1.6P system with a matrox g450. I haven't tested it on any other
cards, but Eric Anholt did test his cards out to see if they worked, and they did.
I believe that includes a radeon and an r128. I have no idea if the pcigart stuff
even has a hope of working at all currently.

There are a few outstanding issues that I can think of off hand:
1) kernel module is not automatically built/installed by a 'make install' in
xsrc/xfree/xc
2) kernel module is not automatically loaded by the X server
3) locators.h is not present but is included by <dev/pci/pcivar.h>
(I've just been touching it for my builds, but that's obviously not the best :)
4) I have no idea if this will work on alpha or any other port with pci. I don't have
the hardware.
5) I haven't actually tested the linux compat portion of this. I just have to build
some X 4.3.0 linux binaries, but haven't gotten around to it.

I can't think of anything else at the moment, but I'm sure there's more :)

Anyway, the patch is at http://www.canuck.com/~reide/netbsd/dri/netbsd-dri.diff.gz

Feedback, please. :)