Buzzing (was :The forbidden topic: Glamo OpenGL)

Lally Singh lally.singh at gmail.com
Mon Nov 17 08:47:24 CET 2008


On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 4:49 AM, The Rasterman Carsten Haitzler
<raster at rasterman.com> wrote:
> 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.

I just wanted to second Raster's point with a small bit of data: X was
designed with much less powerful devices than the moko in mind.  If
you're worried about X being fat, it's not X.  It's stuff built on top
of X, which we don't need.  X ran fine on my 8mb 486.

-- 
H. Lally Singh
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
Virginia Tech




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