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1. The GGI mission

We want to create a reliable, stable and fast graphics system that works everywhere. We want to allow any program using GGI to run on any platform requiring at most a recompile.

It all started out with some people being annoyed by the fact that graphics in Linux means either X or svgalib, and if you use both at the same time, you can easily crash the graphics card and make the system unusable.

The Linux kernel does protect the hardware from faulty user access, so all graphics programs need to be run by root or set-uid root, which poses security problems. If two applications work at the same time with the graphics chip, you can expect problems.

The GGI sets out to solve these problems.

The basic rules we identified are

However, we can't do everything in the kernel if we want to avoid having huge graphics drivers bloating it, which led to the GGI design scheme described in the next chapter.


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