Lukas, Although you may have some valid concerns I think you're missing the big picture.
On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 01:11:17AM +0200, Lukas Molzberger wrote: > Hello, > in recent years many people were talking about Linux on the desktop. > However, before there is any real chance that this could happen a few > fundamential problems in XFree must be solved. These are: > > 1. XFree is far too slow. > 2. What is presented on the screen should always be consistent (i.e. no > flickering). > (3. It should be possible to configure XFree over a dialog that is intergrated > in Gnome and Kde.) First, it isn't X speed which is stopping the desktop on Linux: nowadays people use workstations that are incomparably faster to the machines where X was initially developed. I really don't understand point no 2. Nothing is stopping 3 from being accomplished. (You're also forgetting that to have X configured on a dialog, you need X running and configured on the first place...) > > [...] I think the reason for that is that XFree is > far more complex than necessary for its intended job. > I know there have been countless discussions on the X messaging system, but > most of them missed the point. That is that such a messaging system > introduces an enormous amount of complexity. As far as I know the only reason > for having the X messaging system is the remote display feature. But I guess > that less than 5% of the XFree users are actually using this feature and > there are already other solutions like VNC available. You're forgetting that one of the purposes of the messaging system is to provide a physical seperation between the application the the GUI itself. It will always be need some kind of messaging to accomplish that - either through a socket, an IOCTL, or shared memory - the information has to be encoded somehow. > Another source of complexity comes from the ancient, more than 10 years > old X API. Many people argue that one just has to add new extensions to keep X is used as a low level API - it assumes a toolkit layer is used upon it, such as GTK, or QT. > XFree up to date. But this way X gets more and more complex. And why are the > 2d graphics drivers in users space while the 3d drivers are in kernel space? 3D drivers are mostly in the user space. A 3D driver consist of an implementation of the OpenGL state machine on the client application space (that fills DMA buffers), a very thin layer on ther kernel (that sends the buffers to the hardware), and the 2D driver on X (which setup modes and other things). The kernel isn't the right space for lot of stuff required for 3D (such as floating point ops e.g.). > As a result of this complexity the developers working on XFree are less > efficient and it also keeps new developers from joining this project. What holds development is the paramount of chips supported by X, which result in an huge ammount of maintainance work (testing, debugging, updating). To make a 2D driver one doesn't really need to go into the detail of the messaging encoding or anything like that... > What I want to suggest is to start from scratch and design a new, clean > and modern windowing system without any legacy. I know this would be a > pretty radical cut, but I personally don't see any alternative to overcome the > current problems of XFree. From the contact I had with X I've come to the conlusiong that X gives an effective answer to lot of the issues involved in a GUI. Things could had been done differently, but I doubt they would be much better. > The main problem with a new graphics API would be to keep backward > compatibility with the current application base. But this problem is easy to > solve by just porting XFree to the new API, the way it is done for OS X and > Windows. As said before, most applications don't target X but a higher-level toolkit. You already find GTK and QT on other platforms. GTK can even target the linux framebuffer devices, which should be somthing you ought to be interested in. I think that the biggest drawback in X is its development model. The way as it's done doesn't scale. It doesn't scale with supported hardware, it doesn't scale with the number of features, and it doesn't with the number of people willing to work on it. José Fonseca _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
