x in om2007.2

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 07:52:57 +0000 "sparky mat" <max at sparkymat.net> babbled:

> kinda new here. i noticed that om2007.2 and asu are slower than qtopia
> (the one from trolltech, not the x11 port). i presume its partly
> because X is being used.
> 
> would it make sense to alter gtk+ for om2007.2 to directly write to
> screen? and prolly add some window management i guess.. or make X a
> lot lighter.. are we using X.org or X11. what about TinyX?

no it wouldn't help. x itself is not the problem. the problem is:

1. hardware (limited write/read bus speeds to glamo and lots fo wait states
waiting for glamo).
2. the way apps (gtk+ included) do drawing (eg anti-aliased text required reads
from video ram then writes back to video ram... in fact multiple reads then a
write.. per pixel). as such all you will do is re-invent x. if the small
overhead of including an xserver and x libs on the system were a problem (we had
x16 or 8mb flash) then it'd really matter, but we have lots of flash to spare,
so it's moot. when i say "how gtk draws", i mean that it ships with a fairly
expensive theme, and anti-aliased text are overhead. non-aa text would allow
much faster rendering the way gtk/x draw. or just do all drawing client-side to
avoid to/fro from video ram. but as such - getting rid of x isn't going to
solve your problem as such. it's not to blame.
3. things like efl do all the drawing "client side" in memory when using
software engines - and get extra speed, but then suffer from limited pixel
upload speed. efl can display in x11, or framebuffer (and use xrender and other
targets) and moving to framebuffer doesnt really buy you anything. (qtopia NOT
on x11 - qws, suffers from the same problem. limited video bus access speed).

> i'm not too familiar with most of the tech mentioned above, so I
> apologise if i'm coming across as idiotic.
> 
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-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>