Buzzing (was :The forbidden topic: Glamo OpenGL)

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) raster at rasterman.com
Sun Nov 16 00:05:16 CET 2008


On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:07:25 +0530 Kishore <kitts.mailinglists at gmail.com>
babbled:

> Raster! Wow! Thanks for the detailed response. Really good to know :)
> Well, I certainly do not think that direct fb is a better option over X. It 
> sure is crippling to not have multiple apps have access to the screen while 
> not having to know about the others existence. What i was considering was X 
> itself and its overhead. Its good to know that X does not add much overhead.
> I first got thinking about this when reading about gallium3d. I do recollect 
> reading that the developers were developing it with hope to replace *most* of 
> X and use X only as an interface/API. The reason for this they said was that
> X was bad.
> 
> Now, I do not personally know much about this. But it is of academic interest 
> to me.

x's internals are definitely up for improvement - callium3d is  there to try
and fix this by providing a better more organised and better accelerated driver
layer - but again - they aren't going to replace x... just clean up internals.
what it means is - the rest of us can continue happily writing x apps and just
"wait" for an improvement to pop out the pipeline. indeed x's internal
acceleration layer could be improved. it has in the past (especially with xaa)
proved an impediment if you have to code AT the driver layer. as such - x was
originally designs (as a system - not specifically the xorg tree etc.) to allow
full freedom to implement the internals of x any way you like - so as such if
you wanted to spend the effort x could accelerate just about everything as long
as hardware can do it, somehow - but the points at which that acceleration
knowledge need to go into might be much higher up than xaa/exa. you'd have to
write a "forked" x with all sorts of hooks higher up. - but it's possible...
and then x client work as they always did - and get more use of the hardware :)

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





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