Improving UI performance

sparky mat max at sparkymat.net
Fri Aug 22 14:01:40 CEST 2008


I was just thinking about the various UI-related layers that are there in
2007.2/2008.8/FSO. I understand that the idea is to re-use existing
technologies and concepts from the desktop world. However, wouldn't a
single-layer approach make things run a lot faster? Or have a more
customized / simpler X?

Pros:
1) Faster and lighter UI
2) Benefits derived from (1) - like more memory / processing power for
applications

Suggestion:

A tinier X (than KDrive) that does only full-screen applications and
pop-ups. This would simplify the UI API to a subset of GTK+ / Qt  (??) . The
reason for this suggestion being that generally mobile applications occupy
the whole screen and usually just pop-up smaller stuff once in a while.
Extensive window management is NOT required. Typically the user has 1 or
more applications opens and alt-tabs between them. He doesn't tile them
side-by-side etc. That is (usually) not a valid use-case for mobile
applications.

Disclaimer: I am not well-versed in either of GTK+ or Qt. So some (or all)
of the suggestions above may be stupid.

Also, I read somewhere that GTK+ is not quite optimized enough for OpenMoko
(something about images not being cached, just impacting responsivenes) ?
Are fixes in progress for these? I would like to help. Please direct me to
where I should start looking.
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