[plug] xorg modules now .so?

[Carl Gherardi]

>
> >Can any X gurus out there explain the reasons behind moving from .o
> modules to
> >.so modules in the latest versions of xorg, what the basic differences
> are
> >etc?
> >
> XFree86 and earlier XOrg versions used to use their own custom module
> loader (donated to the project IIRC). I think they did this so they
> could produce driver modules that would work across multiple operating
> systems, independent of local shared library formats and so on. The
> loader also works on OSes without support for shared libraries. Yes,
> they still exist.
>
> I think that the XOrg people decided that was not worth the pain it
> caused, and wasn't getting enough use, so they ditched it in favour of
> using the system's support for runtime library loading. This results in
> a driver format change - your drivers must now be shared libraries, and
> yours is a plain object file, so it won't work.
>
> I could be wrong about this of course, it's just vague memory from when
> it all happened. Try asking Google for details.
>

My understatnding was the major vendors were driving the splitup to improve
the speed of driver and bugfix releases and lower download times.

LWN.net had a good article on this with major motivations not long after the
first or second major release of xorg.

Carl G
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