Bug 2294

Summary:	12+bit pseudo-color visuals useful in our world
Product:	xorg	Reporter:	Peter Bismuti <bismuti>
Component:	Server/General	Assignee:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	high	CC:	alan.coopersmith, aplattner, aritger, eich, roland.mainz, stuart.kreitman
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86 (IA32)
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Peter Bismuti 2005-01-16 08:51:12 UTC

(possible duplication, if so, please forgive me). 

Pseudo-colors are still useful us in the scientific visualization world.  At a 
minimum, some of our legacy apps written on SGIs need to be ported to the 
Linux world, but the lack of pseudo-color support, particularly 12-bit, is a 
very big problem.  We need to at least to keep these crusty graphics on life-
support while we replace them or rewrite them using real colors. We also 
believe that the use of pseudo-color will in fact continue to be useful for 
our purposes. 

I don't want to step into the middle of a holy-war here, trust me when I say 
that it will be very useful to many at least for some period of time to come 
as many people besides us are facing the same problem.  They want to beginning 
porting existing apps to Linux, but porting apps written on old high-end 
workstations is a big problem, and it is ultimately traced to the X server, 
which makes it difficult for us to deal with.  

We are at the mercy of whomever is writing the standard X servers.  NOTE:  
Nvidia does NOT offer drivers for Xi graphics X-server, this is a particularly 
brutal blow because we do not even have the option of a commercial server 
unless there is another one available that I'm not aware of. 

PLEASE add or continue to offer 12-bit psuedocolor support to your X server. 
In particular, we are using an Nvidia graphics card.  Sorry I don't know the 
exact model, but it is very recent.  

humbly yours,
Peter Bismuti

Comment 1 Peter Bismuti 2005-01-16 08:56:34 UTC

Please forward to Ed Eich and Roland Mainz

Comment 2 Roland Mainz 2005-01-16 20:55:01 UTC

Egbert: How difficult would it be to port the current PseudoColor emulation
support to the "nv" driver ?

Comment 3 Egbert Eich 2005-01-17 03:12:05 UTC

Not very difficult I suppose.
I worked on this stuff briefly last December. I'm still struggeling with
creating a window for the overlay screen. Theme cursor supports has to have this.
At the moment I don't have time to look into this.

Comment 4 Roland Mainz 2005-01-17 14:08:57 UTC

Egbert Eich wrote:
> Not very difficult I suppose.
> I worked on this stuff briefly last December. I'm still struggeling with
> creating a window for the overlay screen. Theme cursor supports has to have 
> this.

What about turning the XCURSOR extension off (for the matching drivers if the
PseudoColor emulation is active) for now until this part is working ?

> At the moment I don't have time to look into this.

Can anyone from Sun help here maybe ?

Comment 5 Andy Ritger 2005-01-19 01:08:49 UTC

FWIW, NVIDIA's binary driver currently supports an emulated 8-bit pseudocolor
overlay; search for the "CIOverlay" option in the NVIDIA README:

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-6629/README.txt

It would be technically possible to alternatively provide a 12-bit overlay. 
8-bit and 12-bit could not be available at the same time, because the
mioverlay.c code in the X server only supports one overlay plane.

Peter: I assume these are strictly X applications that require this (no OpenGL)?

Comment 6 Peter Bismuti 2005-01-19 06:26:55 UTC

No, it is primarily an OpenGL code used for scientific visualization.  I've 
just inherited it and had hoped to port it without getting inside it.  Given 
the various obstacles that we're facing, porting the code "as is" to the Linux 
machines we're using is unlikely. I'll have to get inside it.  Not a big deal 
other than there's a deadline.

Comment 7 Daniel Stone 2007-02-27 01:25:06 UTC

Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys.  Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.

Comment 8 Aaron Plattner 2011-05-11 22:13:57 UTC

Closing.  If anyone still cares about this feature request, he can feel free to reopen it (and assign it to himself).

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