On Wed, 2008-12-10 at 01:38 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
Very timely opening of this mailing list, Chris.
I've just come out of a discussion with Jon and David about multiseat
architecture. The results can be seen in
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/Multiseat
That looks sharp.
Two other things that probably need to be addressed:
(1) Starting layered X servers. When attaching a separate seat to each
of the outputs from one video card, it's necessary -- at least with the
current architecture, and for the foreseeable future -- to start one X
server to manage the card, then layer one X server on top of that for
each output. This is usually done with a straight X server on the bottom
and Xephyr servers on the top, but I've also heard of it being done with
Xgl servers on the top (which is a bit more modern and potentially
higher-performance approach).
I don't like layered servers as they really complicates start-up (I
prefer to use multiple cards), but it's the only way to do multiseat in
some contexts and needs to be accommodated. Actually, I was surprised to
hear that the Userful Desktop commercial product uses this approach
across all seats (not confirmed, but it was a Userful employee that told
me this).
(2) Sound and PulseAudio come into this picture too, so I've invited
Lennart to join the list. ConsoleKit needs to talk to PulseAudio to give
it a set of audio devices associated with a particular seat.
-Chris