Multiseat

Previously, the message was for toolkit, now it targets new upcoming developers… okay, if I’d be offensive I could say it targets vendor distributions which care for desktop on Linux :)

So last week I posted on lkml an old patch that we were carrying for a long time in the Linux community. It basically brings the multiple (old) video cards functionally again on Linux and X server (and this time doing on the right and beauty way). For the people that was following multiseat implementations, this is a HUGE step: we will finally be able to discard the old and ugly hack (a mix of Xorg, several Xephyr servers + evdev) and and go to a clean way, starting multiple X servers in parallel. Cool! Well, not that much, because it might take some time to be in your beloved distribution :)

This week our laboratory at university released the MDM utility to ease the process of installation and configuration of a multiseat box. The idea is that the end-user should not use some boring and hard howtos anymore to deploy it. Just installing a distro package must be enough now. Try it, use it, report the bugs and send the patches! :)

Today, Paulo Zanoni help me to put in a shape the VgaArbiter wiki page. The primary intention of that page is to bring more developers in that project and some users++ who could also help testing. Feedback is very welcome. Here is the link.

After a long journey I come back in this… So I did a set of benchmarks to evaluate the VGA arbitration versus the RAC usage. My goal is to evaluate the performance difference of a multi-head/multi-card environment, i.e., an Xorg using the RAC to another using the arbitration.