Buzzing (was :The forbidden topic: Glamo OpenGL)

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) raster at rasterman.com
Sat Nov 15 10:49:10 CET 2008


On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 07:22:29 +0000 Stroller <stroller at stellar.eclipse.co.uk>
babbled:

> 
> On 15 Nov 2008, at 07:08, Kishore wrote:
> 
> > On Friday 14 Nov 2008 8:13:20 pm Gothnet wrote:
> >> Also, I know everyone loves X, but is it really the best choice for  
> >> a low
> >> powered device that needs a responsive UI?
> > ...
> > I still would like to know more in terms of performance and memory  
> > consumption
> > and scalability.
> 
> You guys should search some of Raster's previous posts on this  
> subject. Although you may have to go through quite a lot of posts to  
> find his comments (!), I think you will find he has stated more than  
> once that the performance of X is much maligned (as long as  
> programmers are sensible and use appropriate practices).

indeed it is. i have seen x (+efl) drastically (by many times) outperform
directfb - on the same device. every time someone thinks that the ui sucks and
the solution is "dump x" it is almost always from a position of lack of
knowledge just what is the cause of the problem. a bit of analysis and you'll
find the problem is almost always one (or more) of

1. just bad hardware (affects everyone x and others)
2. incomplete or just bad drivers (not x itself and the same problem will
happen anywhere you try and accelerate so if its within x or somewhere else -
same problem).
3. simple bad x apps or toolkits doing things badly, inefficiently or just
trying to do things in a way that just reacts badly with the target hardware.

whatever you do in replacing x - you will just replace it with the same thing
under a different name. you won't improve or solve anything, as long as you want
to have more than 1 process be able to display. if it's only one, dumb-fb is an
option but you still need to then do the whole toolkit so see the above problem
list. and you just lost multi-process access, lost a lot of support for a lot
of toolkits, apps etc. if you want to x CAN be used as a dumb-fb with little
extra overhead.

if you really want to sink a lot of time i can go into gory detail one thing at
a time... but you can also just search these lists and save me the effort :) x
gives you the ability to share input devices (kbd, ts, etc.) and share the
screen. you want that. it is not big and fat. it is rather small and lean.
extensions exist to do just about everything. very little does not exist in
some x extension these days.

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster at rasterman.com





More information about the community mailing list