Slashdot Mirror
The XFree86 Fork() Saga Continues
Mortimer.CA writes "An article up on OSNews about the XFree story
mentioned earlier. Included is: replacing fontconfig with Sun's stsf; XFree86 co-founder David Wexelblat saying that XFree is today obsolete and should be changed; Keith Packard replying, and more."
fork(), you mean.
From the slashdot.org 'Post Comment' page:
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!)
I know I should RTFA before posting, but the link points to http://slashdot.org/TheXFree86Fork()SagaContinues, and that can't be right.
Hmm, bad link
e s
http://slashdot.org/TheXFree86Fork()SagaContinu
404 File Not Found
The requested URL (TheXFree86Fork()SagaContinues) was not found.
If you feel like it, mail the url, and where ya came from to pater@slashdot.org.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3090.
Not http://slashdot.org/TheXFree86Fork()SagaContinues
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Here is the real link to the article on OSNews
Link
Posting as directed.
http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3090
Attack of the Spoons
correct link
Time for Fresco?
I can't help myself...
;^)
"The saga continues..."
"Use the fork() David"
(BTW, expect to bring about introduction of new post-rating: +5 Lame!
I have a bad feling that this is goint to be one of those situations where *every* party involved is both right and wrong on some level. Even uglier is the possibility that this could occur on the *same* level. The fact that situations like this could arise in the first place tells me that maybe the architecture of XFree86 (the ideas underlying the code itself) is overly complex for today's needs.
Or another possibility: maybe the way XFree86 is currently implemented by the major *nix vendors is overly complex by default.
Either way, both the situation and the implementation are starting to look really messy.
C|N>K
The next serie will have auto-detection for the best drivers.
It'll be cleaned and retain optional (modular) backward compatibility.
I think this will be a great step against turning obsolete.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Now, that was an interesting reading in the XFree86 forum mailing list. We get individuals, companies like Sun, SciTechSoft, Red Hat etc. 'fighting' for issues varying from what XFree86 really needs, down to replacing fontconfig with Sun's stsf, XFree86 co-founder David Wexelblat saying that XFree is today obsolete and that needs to be replaced with a direct-rendered model (by retaining backwards compatibility), Keith Packard replying as to why a new organization to handle X is needed, and more.
Our Take: One thing is clear after reading all these messages: a lot of people are not happy with what's happening with the development of XFree86. It is obvious that more discussion is needed to decide what's going to be implemented and what not, and from these emails there, it seems that there was no real/common direction discussed between the interested parties until yesterday. No real communication seemed to exist!
Let's hope that this open forum list will show what people want and need and will 'open' the XFree86 organization in a way that will allow more CVS commits, as the project seems kind of stagnant and doesn't move as fast as it should have, as some Red Hat employees also noted (for example, direct changing of resolution was introduced just a few months ago with RandR extension, while Windows 95 could do that in 1995).
The XFree86 project always looked a bit conservative to me while more development and openess is needed. There is no need for a "new XFree", but there is a need for more development and 'fixing' on the existing codebase.
--------
Free your mind.
If this leaves the XFree86 project as a more flexable, open, and more modular project, then so be it. I'm all for anything that can improve performance for *NIX GUIs.
From everything I see, it's too late in the game to make a new graphical interface - unless it has a compatability layer to work with X apps. But even then, we'd need to develop it FAST to make sure *NIX doesn't fall behind in the OS game.
I am a filthy pirate.
The correct link for the article is here
Do you people recall the Armageddon textfile that got post on /. several times ? Here a little quote from the text.
well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use GNOME and let them do whatever they like. Well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. GNOME is influencing a lot of third party projects such as XFree86 which recently added a lot of GNOME components into their CVS repository. Please know that with the next coming XFree86 version you get a lot of GNOME components without even knowing it. code like, GNOME-XML, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into GNOME development. Also the GIMP is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native GNOME application. The CVS version of the GIMP has a lot of GNOME pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the GIMP into GNOME. If not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.
And this will happen with an Forked XFREE. It matures more and more into a GNOME dependant piece of Software. Exactly that guy who's responsible adding all sorts of GNOME material to it will now make XFREE mature into some GNOME dependant component.
Havoc Pennington (GNOME) works on XFREE,
Owen Taylor (GTK+) works on XFREE,
Jim Gettys (XFREE) and GNOME FOUNDATION president,
Keith Packard (XFREE) and GNOME developer.
Psssshht! I mean really! Who wants to setup a thin-client model at their business anyway? I mean saving millions of dollars? What's up with that?!
and it has ugly ass fonts....
Damn straight! Anyone who has zero knowledge about X knows that the fonts are hard coded into the display manager. And that there's no way you can add new fonts to it.
and it has shit write to hardware through TCP ports...
Like, I'm saying, yo! There ain't no client/server interface. When you be sending them X packets to the other computer, you're talking directly to the hardware! That's why every X command is "add ax,bx" and sh*t like that! It's pure assembly, bro!
Everyone knows that the only way to do it is to build a gigantic motherf*cking graphics subsystem into the kernel so that your system resources are halved and your OS crashes every week. Like, that's the ONLY way it should be.
I looked at some of the screenshots for stsf and I think that it's pretty sweet. The standard Motif font menu labels are hilarious though, the selectable fonts look awesome and the old motif fonts in the menus look terrible.
Here's some links to the screenshots of stsf running on Solaris 9:
xclock -digital -fg yellow -bgpixmap SolarisLogo.pm -fga 0.5
LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8 xclock -digital -bgpixmap RicePaper.pm
My blog
...MPlayer supports VESA too...
Shameless, thou art. You missed out on the score 5 informative, and the score 3 interesting. Welcome to the Redundant and off-topic mods.
:)
I'll join ya.
--------
Free your mind.
Replacment for XFree:
framebuffer + fbdri/dri + picogui + *choice_wm_or_environment
I'd totally disagree with you about the fonts, on my system the fonts are gorgeous (the TTF ones anyway). Antialiasing is good and things are getting better every release.
As not enough that GNOME shit made it's way into Xfree86, now the minions of GNOME want to fork Xfree86 and make it become some more dependant to GNOME. Specially this mail is quite annoying. Xfree86 should not include the application breaking specs from FreeDesktop.org. An fork of Xfree86 is interesting and of course good for the future but not if it's made by the GNOME people who are only interested to push their own visions into their own fork of Xfree86.
Please think about this. Specially FreeDesktop.org caused no good. Try doing a fullscreen with Phoenix on GNOME 2.x with MetaCity. The specs break nearly every 2nd application.
The concept of the community voting for membership in the leadership of the project is an almost, if not totally, non-existant concept in the Open Source world (feel free to show me examples). I'm not talking about advocacy groups, like Linux International. I'm talking about development projects. XFree86 has no interest in this, as far as I can tell.
I can think of one right now. So can he, since he mentions it a few paraghraphs later. The FreeBSD Core team is elected. To be core on FreeBSD you have to be an active developer, and have not pissed too many other developers off recently (or at least pissed them off less than most other people). Sounds like a good idea to me...
Oh. Wait. Sorry, I forgot. FreeBSD is dead. I really should stop using it sometimes soon. Can't be using a dead OS on my desktop...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Whatever happened to choice in this debate?
We can choose between various window managers, various linux flavors, and even office suites. Why don't we have a choice with our window system?
Why would it be any different for a fork of X for a choice between client/server and direct rendering, if backwards compatability was kept?
Would that not help the the people who only use Linux on their desktop, while allowing people with networks to use the tool, as it is now, that works for them?
How this got modded up is beyond me. Not only is it not insightful, it's downright wrong!
When communicating to local hardware, there is no TCP/IP anywhere. It communicates over a local socket. It has been implemented with shared memory, and guess what? It didn't perform any better than over a local socket! That's why you don't see shared memory in XFree today.
And i dunno about you, but my fonts look just fine. They're probably the same TrueType fonts you've seen a million times on Windows.
b.c
IMHO a simpler version of Xfree86 with better font support should be developed for Desktop Linux. Remove all the complicated networking code which is not used in Desktops and comeup with a faster, more agile X. BTW I am not a programmer, so I may be talking total bs
I recently saw somebody try to contribute a new driver to XFree86. He was told that he was welcome to contribute the driver, but that he wouldn't be allowed write access to it once he had handed it over. What a ridiculous policy!
The thing is, drivers can be released independently of X itself. For ATI Radeons, for example, there are at least 3 different drivers they can use. It would be nice if somebody set up a website with a page for each video card (or family of cards) that had links to all of the available video drivers for that card. Even better would be if such a website could act as a catalyst for uniting these independent driver developers so that, for example, the GATOS radeon driver developers and the DRI radeon driver developers could combine the best aspects of their drivers. This could possibly help route around the blockage that the XFree86 project too often represents.
Actually, I think that such "hardware-centric clearing houses" would be useful for all kinds of hardware, not just video cards. Look at linuxprinting.org to see how well it can work.
-DA
all I could picture was "The Swedish (chef) Programmer" saying:
Ya booor skay, ska boo ske-deeke-skeee Fork()!Fork()!Fork()!
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
X is the single biggest obstacle to Linux becoming a usable desktop OS. It's absolutely fantastic at doing what it was designed to do, but it has no place in a desktop environment.
Heck, most of the time even Terminal Services on Windows 2000 (running over a 10mbit network) is more responsive than my Linux box.
The recent Slashdot story about kernel tweaking (kernel tweaking!) to make X more responsive underscores this perfectly. First you start tweaking the kernel... and then you realize that you have to move the graphics subsystem closer to ring 0 to make the thing work at sufficient speed. The very thing that Windows has been criticized for since NT 3.51 came out.
Get rid of X and you have a desktop OS that can actually compete. You DO NOT abstract the windowing system first and then tack stuff to it (say "OpenGL") - you put the graphics close to the metal and then abstract that instead. That's why DirectX is the darling of game developers.
X really needs to standardize itself. Copying and pasting is a bitch....X is heavy at times too and somewhat bloated. Change would be greatly welcomed...or a new X-Windows engine...
As David W points out, XFree86 is around 11 years old. I was around when the project was started and was a low-key member (my name was all over the documentation for many years afterwards and may still be, I haven't checked for a long time).
Anyway, one thing that rarely gets mentioned is how XFree86 itself was a fork. A fork from a recalcitrant developer, namely Thomas Roell. Roell went on to be a principal (probably founding) engineer at Xinside, later renamed Xi Graphics. Roell was the primary author of X386 which was the only freely available X server for x86 systems (typically SVR3 and SVR4 unices from a handful of companies like AT&T and Dell - yes Dell actually had their own Unix distribution and it was pretty kickass too). X386 had limited chipset support (IRC, Tseng Labs ET4000 was the faster chipset it supported) and little if any support for hardware acceleration.
Anyway, the story gets a little murky here, because I wasn't in on all the background machinations, but a couple of developers who are now in the core group (DavidW for one, and I'm thinking David Dawes and Tsilias, but don't quote me) got together and forked their version of X386 to add support for more chipsets and more OSes, kinda leaving Roell (unhappily) in the dust. It didn't help that Roell's got an ego (which he *mostly* deserves) and that DavidW had a kind of angry-young-man online persona at the time either.
It appears that Roell eventually got over it, but never enough to join in the fun. Instead he went on to do commercial X server development, ultimately at XiG.
But, the moral of the story here is that XFree86 itself (even before it had a name, I remember the vote on the mailing list, I didn't vote for it, thought it was kinda dorky, but I guess my own suggestion was even dorkier since it didn't win) is a fork of code that was floundering and not being developed fast enough for the tastes of some people. People who were willing to put their code where their mouthes were and to improve the situation, and who didn't really care too much who they pissed off in the process as long as the end result was a big improvement - and that it definitely was.
I've been out of the loop on XFree86 for many years, but from the outside looking in, this current spat has the ring of history repeating itself to me. It is just more public since the userbase is a couple of orders of magntitude larger than it was the first time around, and there was no slashdot back then either...
I still remember the transition from X10 to X11.
However, version 11 is almost 15 years old and we
never saw any version 12 (not that I beleive version numbering is any important).
Although I saw some nice extensions being added to the X protocol, there are many parts of the X window system that are now obsolete.
For instance the standard X11 font rendering system looks like it has been kept in the stone age (only recently the Xft extension solved part of the problem).
I really like the network transparency of X and the client-server model, because of all it's advantages and, if you look at it in detail, you will be surprised that it doesn't impose any performance penalty: because of the way the X protocol is implemented, commands are queued by the client and are sent to the server in batches, in order to minimize client/server context switching.
However, in the last 12 years we have seen the graphics hardware improove a lotm but the core X system didn't improove almost anything.
Now we have hardware capable of displaying full motion video, hardware video decompressing, anti-aliasing, alhpa-blending and transparency, 3D, etc.
Meanwhile, X got some extensions to support some of these features, but there are no "standard" APIs and the evolution has been very slow.
X is great, and many of the complaints about X that I regularly read here in
FreeBSD is a peripheral enough project that there isn't the kind of politics that leads to people stacking meetings and staging votes.
XFree86 is far bigger. It would be very hard for there not to be major politics, vote stacking, etc., if the core was elected. It's 'the one and only', not one of several freenixes, as is the case with FreeBSD.
I spent a brief time working as a contractor for a Linux distributor (now defunct). During that time, I was given the task of maintaining portions of XFree86's XInput and DRI code. What I saw, I didn't like.
Efforts to extend XFree86 to support modern graphics capabilities (XRender, Xft, R&R) are floundering because the level of skill needed to develop and maintain them is simply too high. The XFree86 codebase reinvents many wheels, is difficult to maintain and really does carry a lot of legacy footwork that makes it difficult to work with.
That said, XFree86 works amazingly well for what it is. I just don't think XFree86 development is sustainable. The same effects can be achieved with a thin layer like DirectFB without the overhead. You get the same functionality, usually better performant and with far less code necessary in the implementation. Network transparency can easily be provided by modern component object models like GNOME's Bonobo and KDE's Kparts, with the added bonus that clients are thin and so still usable over a high-latency network.
I wouldn't go so far as to call XFree86 obsolete, but the technologies upon which it's based certainly are.
I have a great deal of respect for the core GNOME team and I disagree on the motives that the GNOME team is headed. Its a good thing for more and more people in the corporate setting to use GPL'd software. Will Ximian or RedHat see a profit because of this? Yes, of course, but so what?
Have you ever been around MS Windows users in the corporate offices? Let me tell you, these aren't the type of people that hack the kernel - in fact, I'd say 95% of them don't know what a kernel is and, more importantly, they don't care.
If computers are to make our lives easier then that includes those for whom computers are not a passion but simply a tool that should enable them to be more productive at the tasks they excel in. Our job as computer professionals is to help them achieve their goals by giving them an easy-to-use, powerful, and non-buggy tool.
and it has ugly ass fonts
>>>>>>>>>
Check out this and this. The letter shapes, even on the complex Kaufmann font, are incredible. They'll probably look color fringed on a CRT, because I took these with subpixel AA enabled.
hardware through TCP ports
>>>>>>>>>>
Um, XFree86 uses UNIX domain sockets (very fast on Linux) for local connections, not TCP sockets!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I don't buy your conclusion. While it is considered a good thing to have a flexible, open, and modular system, it usually comes at the expense of performance.
The highest performing systems are virtually always those which are coded specifically to one point, and not for the whole spectrum.
-Steve
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
F _______ /;,;O;,;\
R
A |,;,;,;,|
N \;,;H;,;/
C |;,H,;|
E |,;H;,|
|;,H,;|
G |,;H,;|
I |;,H,;|
R |;,H,;|
L |,;H,;|
S |;,H;,|
|,;H,;|
A |;,H;,|
R / H \ E
E / H \ S
/ A \ I
R | A A | U
E | AAAAA | G
A | ________ | S
L / / \ \ I
Y/ / \ \ D
| | | |
G=== === N
E R M A N G I R L S I
Go sit on your own Dick^H^H^H^Hincomplete Skyscaper
Damn straight! Anyone who has zero knowledge about X knows that the fonts are hard coded into the display manager. And that there's no way you can add new fonts to it.
Yeah, it's soooo easy to do it too.
Everyone knows that the only way to do it is to build a gigantic motherf*cking graphics subsystem into the kernel so that your system resources are halved and your OS crashes every week. Like, that's the ONLY way it should be.
You're biased toward X. It is old and needs to be replaced. You're like the last gasps of a dying regime.
Blair announced publicly that the oil fields would go into UN trusts. So much for that.
What's that sound? Oh, it's the tired "war for oil" argument being blown away into oblivion for the last time.
The 'fetchmail' project has contributions from over 800 developers.
Isn't that the project that ol' Raymond is nominally in charge of? He's driving people away after their first code contribution?
The key issue here, as far as I can tell, is whether the XFree86 guys were correct to kick Keith Packard out.
On the one hand, David Wexelblat has strong words about Keith Packard's actions:
What Keith has done is among the most low-class, unprofessional, and tactless things I have ever experienced in my professional career.
For Keith to blatantly lie to the Core Team about what he was doing is utterly unacceptable.
But what Keith is doing, at least how he's handled it, is just flat out wrong. It's literally dishonest, and morally repugnant. Doesn't mean that there aren't some valid issues to work, or that there is no need for branching, but (a) it remains to be proven, and (b) I'll be damned if I'll quietly accept it being done by someone who is lying to my face.
Whew. On the other hand, here's what Keith Packard has to say:
Some have suggested that this was a secret attempt to undermine the XFree86 project: this was not my intent. I have tried as hard as I can to work within the existing XFree86 structure.
It's hard to think that this is some kind of misunderstanding. Either Keith has been lying, or else he hasn't. It's impossible for us to really decide for ourselves, since the emails containing the alleged lying are not public.
David Wexelblat said:
There is an email thread documenting this. Some members of the BOD wanted to post the email, or quotes therefrom, with the announcement. I and some of the others were utterly uncomfortable doing that. I don't think anyone on the BOD or Core Team would have any issues with an independent audit of this email thread, if there are concerns about the veracity of what I say, but airing that in public isn't appropriate, IMHO.
I'd like to see someone I trust given the job of auditing those emails, and judging whether Keith Packard has in fact been lying.
P.S. A fork might be a good thing, in the end. Keith Packard says he believes his fork can attract more developers and improve more quickly than the status quo. If he can pull that off, we will all be better off. But unless he can clear his name, he may have trouble attracting developers.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
As I can see, the "fight" is between having very flexible, transparently remote thin client GUI and localy optimized fast workstation GUI. First case is X11 and the second are a couple of new projects like SVGAlib, directfb, DDI, GGI etc... But with such a fragmentation or (calling it another way) variety of projects we are still in troubles missing good gfx card drivers (full MPEG-2D-3D acceleration, tv-ins/outs, for all new chipsets and a few or older ones)... So my question is if it's posible to separate X11 from it's drivers and having those as separate project... and then build on them whatever GUI API you want including development of X11... but having hardware driver building effort focused on one project... like you have only one kernel project that takes care of your hardware and many apps that may duplicate their functions...
Just some thoughts anyway...
I cannot think of a rational response to what you wrote as its just so horribly asinine.
There was a design decision made when creating X that displaying windows on a local workstation should be as easy as displaying windows on a remote workstation. This decision affected several things about X, and made the X API's extremely difficult to learn (pick up an X book, you'll see), but extremely powerful.
Basically, what some people are saying is that that decision was wrong - that it's not correct to design an entire graphics API around the concept of displaying windows locally and remotely.
Really, the most objective way to analyze that claim is to look at how many windows users open on their own workstation, versus how many remoted X applications they run. Compare that percentage. Then take a look at how much more complex X was made to handle the eventuality of having to handle remote windows, etc, etc. Is it worth it?
Me personally, I don't think so. The only real use I've had for remote X applications was in terms of systems administration - but this is stuff I could have done as easily with something like ssh, or, if I needed some kind of graphics, PC Anywhere, or Timbuktu. And for applications to be faster, better behaved, and less bloatey, I'd be willing to install some PC anywhere-style application on the occasional remotely-controlled server. For the most part, people would be able to leave it out.
That being said, I've never used X in a thin-client environment - it's possible that it could perform quite well - and I've heard that the X protocols are very good at keeping network use down. It still strikes me as not the right distribution of power between server and client, but what the hell do I know?
Its a good operating system that, with the proper tools, anyone can use.
The FreeBSD Committers are named by the Core Team.
The FreeBSD Core Team is elected by the Committers.
Hardly democracy - just a more formalized way that people can work their way into the meritocracy.
...X is in need of a regime change. /me ducks
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The notion that there is anything "direct" about Windows GUI rendering is silly. And for the Mac, it's even sillier, given that it uses a PDF-based system derived from DisplayPostscript. The world has moved to an X11 model, it's just that most application programmers haven't figured out yet that the world has shifted under their feet.
X11 needs major work, things like transparency, rendering, server-side vector graphics, etc.--and that is happening. But one thing it doesn't need is turn into a pretend-frame-buffer library. The other thing it doesn't need is to have a lot of junk and policy hard-coded into the server (widgets, window management, etc.), like some would-be competitors are trying to do.
Yup and that badly-written .net or java application which you converted to with your thin-client setup will need most of those pennies.
Havoc, Miguel, Michael, Daniel, etc are very good, high-quality programmers and we, as the users of open source software, should be thankful they're writing code and giving it back to the community and not working in an environment where such comradery is frowned upon.
Something that David Wexelblat posted bothers me. I'm sort of confused by his stance, because while he admittedly does not use X, he is at the same time airing his criticisms of it, yet refusing to let Keith Packard fork gracefully. Anyway the bit that bothers me:
"- There is no reason for Core Team matters to be public. This is the
leadership forum, not a public forum."
What is the difference between Core Team members keeping their plans secret and not allowing the public to participate, and Keith Packard keeping *his* plans secret and not letting the Core Team know about them, which he is getting lambasted for? Sort of hypocritical. If the X license is an Open Source license, the Core Team doesn't have any special rights with regard to modification and distribution than Joe Hacker who wants to fork it does. X (X11R6) hasn't changed in a hell of a lot of time (relative to most opens source projects), so what is the purpose of shielding XFree from the public? Some panties need to be untied.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
...after reading your long message, and also reading David Wexelblat's message, and reading all the stuff that came before, it's pretty clear to me: the X Core Team doesn't want to talk. They don't want outside input, they've deluded themselves into thinking that other Open Source projects are just as closed as they are, and they really don't see where all these outsiders get the right to have an opinion. They ask why you (Keith) didn't open a discussion with them, but then act hostile to nearly everything that is discussed.
I don't know how to write a driver for X, but I do know people. And you're banging your head against a wall as long as you try to work within their system. Good luck with whatever you decide.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Hmmm. Someone should clue in the Debian project that they're somehow doing a nonexistent thing by holding regular elections for their leaders.
- pluggable implementations (on Linux alone, there's XFree86, MetroX, Accelerated-X,
...)
- better opportunity for security (though I grant it's not often taken)
- cleaner interaction between applications displaying on the same desktop-- most of the "hacks" won't let applications running in different places share a desktop transparently
For that matter, most desktops released within the last 8 years are so slow and bloaty themselves they can't afford a wire protocol abstraction layer between them and the display driver! Try something truly lightweight, like twm or one of the early incarnations of fvwm with something better than those miserable default configurations, and watch your desktop scream, even with X's supposed weight....when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
I was appalled at how many folks jumped on Keith after the initial /. article. I mean, they were basing their responses on a one-sided tale.
I knew Keith back in the X Consortium days, before anyone was even attempting a serious port to X86 boxes - because they were just too pathetic. Keith has always had an excellent attitude, and cared deeply about the technology, the developers, and the user community.
If Keith has problems with the way something is being handled, only a *fool* would refuse to listen. And that doesn't say much for the folks at Xfree86 who kicked him out, with essentially no notice.
If you've paid any attention at all, XFree86 has been slowing down. Releases get slower and provide less. The driver issue is well documented already.
The X Consortium did far more with far less than XFree86 has been doing the last couple of years, and (IMO) did it much better.
I haven't been involved in XFree86 (I haven't even tried to for several years), so I don't know what the underlying problem is. But I would definitely listen to Keith, and to David Wexelblat, as well.
Maybe, just maybe, we'll get something that works.
[And for those who want to chuck X, well, go use Windows, or suggest a better alternative. To date, I haven't seen anything close. And if you didn't have to live in the pre-X11 world, you have *no* idea what you're proposing - unles syou have that alternative handy.]
i was optimizing my mandrake system for audio use, which meant installing a pre-emptible and low-latency patched kernel source package and recompiling it for my specific cpu / architecture
and that meant X turned from snappy enough to blisteringly fast
what is the problem with X then?
the problem is that the linux kernel is optimized on most distibutions NOT for low latency but for high throughput, due to its being used mostly for server boxes.
so if you actually take the time to either pick a kernel that is suitable for desktop use or compile one yourself (which I duly recommend, I learned a LOT from doing so) you have a high-latency/high-througput server kernel. X being slow has nothing to do with X itself, but on the kernel that is running underneath.
your comment about kernel tweaking is sort of like playing quake 3 on a p66 and complaining that its slow and ID software told you to (gasp) TWEAK YOUR COMPUTER! Unthinkable!
Jag pratar lite svenska.
Removing network transparency would go a long way to making X (or whatever else replaces it) much more lightweight.
And I told you to suck my cock, because PicoGUI has nothing to do with X11 as you asserted earlier.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
You mean that unix might actually get a display engine, windowing system, UI toolkit and desktop that is completely integrated from top to bottom? Oh no, we can't have that! That's the evil, evil idea that made Microsoft and Apple all of those billions of dollars of bad, bad money! We must stay pure and true and hold fast to the same awful model that lost Sun, HP, Apollo, SGI, Stardent, Argent and Domain the workstation market! Despite all that tempts us, we will never waver in our determination to become yet another UNIX footnote!
p.s. if there is to be some kind of unified X11/Gnome thingy, it won't be called XFREE. XFree86 is a trademark of the XFree86 Project, Inc, a privately held corporation. The code is free, but the name is not.
p.p.s. Of course if such a project were released, obviously the first side effect would be that the entire XFree86 core team would spontaneously combust, every copy of the XFree86 source tree mysteriously vanish, and every computer running XFree86 automatically update itself to the new system, so I guess I can see your concern.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
How about combining the xserver and xlib, bypassing the x protocol completely? Or is that what the shared memory extension already does?
because the US taxpayer pays for the war, whereas the oil companies don't.
Now said this, please think that there are a lot of users who DO NOT use GNOME or KDE
Since Gnome and KDE are a part of any modern distribution, I think the number of people who don't use them is probably a small minority. For all you people who are stubbornly sticking with Afterstep or Window Maker and no desktop environment, you're missing out on a decent amount... join the 21st century.
a new Xfree86 which contains full of GNOME crap inside and requires the user to install a lot of crappy GNOME dependencies before getting Xfree86 installed ?
*sigh*... I really don't think you understand the things that are in there. Stuff like fontconfig, xcursor, pkgconfig, and xft2 are NOT dependant on Gnome (In fact, it's the other way around, Gnome requires them, just like it requires Xlib). Also, they are NOT only for Gnome. They just happen to be good ideas that haven't been completely adopted yet. Even though they came from developers that you seem to have a personal grudge against, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're "wrong". fontconfig and xft2 deal with fonts (obviously), and are used by both Gnome and KDE. xcursor is all about changing the cursor, which MS-Win has been able to do for over 10 years now. pkgconfig is a simple way to keep track of whats on your system independant of rpms or debs or source (which really should have been done a long time ago).
Just because XTerm doesn't use xft2 yet doesn't mean that xft2 is there just for Gnome.
1) GNOME got screwed up by Havoc Pennington
That's all a matter of perspective. Many people think that Gnome is a lot better now, since a lot of the useless cruft has been removed for the sake of a clean, simple desktop.
2) Havoc Pennington want's HIG unified,
3) Havoc Pennington want's unification of bottom framework of KDE and GNOME,
So? What's wrong with that? If your insinuation is that he's going to mess those up, I think you're overestimating Havoc's power. If the KDE team doesn't like something, he's not going to be able to force them to use the HIG's or framework or whatnot. KDE and Gnome unification is something that really would be good for the Linux community.
Besides, even if parts of Gnome and KDE are merged into XFree86, what's so bad about that? Since probably 90% of the X11 users are running this stuff anyways, I don't see any major reason to keep a huge wall between them. If a small change in X can make the Gnome/KDE teams jobs much easier, then I'm all for it. Not to mention that all this new-fangled stuff can help out other projects like XFce, so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel.
If you're really afraid of all this change, then feel free to continue running X11R5 or something that will keep you back in the dark ages where fonts are jagged and your modelines are fixed.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
I was initially skeptical of Keith Packard's fork but after reading his email, I support it. He addressed the issues that I have been complaining about for years.
KeithP is one of the few people who could make a fork work.
I have a hard time with David Wexelblat who doesn't work on XFree86 and doesn't even believe in it, insulting one of the key developers.
Hey that's not fair that I^h he gets modded down because I^h he posted it at the same time as that other guy who got modded up to +5!!! It's only fair that I should get modded up to +2 or +3 and the previous guy get's modded down to +3 or +2 to make it even. OR ELSE I'M NEVAR POSTING AGAIN!!1! L00ZARS!
- apps
public opinion is not a quality indicator of most things. I mean, we're writing software not competing for miss america or american idol. The masses are fickle and any project worth something will not base its future direction on the immediate attractability of certain features.
If it is realy free software, let the guy fork. The better software will survive. Sombody ought to explain how free software works to them. As for "going behind" peoples backs, you all sound like little girls.
Sounds like the middle kingdom. Fork everyone, and get me some anti-aliased fonts!
What is the truth?
There is no fork.
"Allow?"
"Prove?"
"Allow?"
Okay, either you are an excellent troll or a complete fucking idiot. I'm betting on the latter, but let me congratulate you in advance, just in case it's the former.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I'm sure David did not say THAT. It's XFree86, a take-off on the X386 name used by a previous project.
While we're at it, "X Windows" is also wrong. I've seen plenty of that, too.
Now lets see if I can come up with some good speling flames...
Just as Linux, BSD, SCO and a few others all provide implementations of (more or less) the "UNIX" specification on i386 hardware, there are multiple implementations of the X11R6 standard on i386-based unixes.
If you don't like XFree86, the folks at XiG would be happy to sell you a copy of AccelX. MetroLink systems still offers Metro-X (which was the bomb back in the RedHat 4 days...dunno about now), and if you don't have any money to spend, you can still download, compile and use the honest-to-god MIT/XConsortium X11R6.6 server.
If you want a windowing system that's not based on X11, your options are a bit more slender, but they're there. The Fresco project (formerly "Berlin") looks promising, as does PicoGui.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
99% is an absurdly high estimate. If you remove network transparency, you destroy X for hundreds of users here who use it every single day.
Anybody know where the canon X interface documentation is? I.E., something that someone can use to start their own X server project? I've seldom gone below the toolkit level, so I'm curious - just how baroque is the raw interface, anyway?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
And that is where network transparency will really show its worth. You'd run both servers pick the right client for most of the apps and have the other client be interfacing at the "standard X11 non enhanced version for the other apps".
I'm assuming of course that both will support generic X standards since both the Xfree86 and Kevin consider those goals.
>It communicates over a local socket.
This is really the traditional way that UNIX does things, and it's been refined to a high degree. It works _very_ well. However, is it such a good idea to route latency-sensitive data through the file subsystem.
Atheos claims that it's messaging system is both fast and responsive making the GUI much faster than X overall. How does the Atheos scheme compare to Beos and QNX/Neutrino? How much faster than X? Do we have anything to make apple2apple comparisons?
It seems to me that using (exclusively) a low latency setup like this would allow you to optimize the dispatch of your draw commands. Would this not make the system much snappier overall?
-G
There needs to be *major* innovation with X11 server. i really think that having a fork would give either side a push to make sure that each next release would be that much better. I honestly think that X11 needs to be replaced anyway by something new, with standards built in. Being free to do whatever you want is great, but you can also allow a lot of bad practices to become the "cream" of the crop pretty easy.
At which point it would no longer be X, in which case you might as well just start a new project (or fork).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well - one thing for sure I think after reading the article..
'Wexelblat shouldnt have anything to do with XFree86 or X anymore..
He very obviously doesnt believe in it anymore - if he ever really did.
This isnt the kind of attitude you want having ANY control over XFree86 or X.
Ex:
"client-server display systems are utterly irrelvent to the majority of real-world computer users.."
are you kidding me?!?
what a dick!
Perhaps Keith Packard wasnt trying to 'subvert' anything..
Perhaps he was trying to start a revolution - that looks like it might be needed.
-- NeTMoNGeR
Maybe the same fonts, but I doubt they look the same. Unless...did you turn on hinting? If so: did you pay Apple for the privilege of doing so?
Anti-aliasing is no substitute for hinting. XFree86 fonts will continue to look like shit until Apple's patent expires.
If you're really afraid of all this change, then feel free to continue running X11R5 or something that will keep you back in the dark ages where fonts are jagged and your modelines are fixed.
Just to point out. If you are using the large paper white XTerm monitors from the late 80's early 90's Xfonts look wonderful. PC monitors are generally not 75 or 100 dpi. Take your windows system and change the dpi to an X setting and you'll get the same problems.
The issue with jagged fonts on clients is clients not having the right font sets.
The X consortium. The only problem is they don't allow individuals to join you have to be a corporate entity and you have to pay big bucks. The meaningful standard is Xfree86 since X.org has dropped the ball. The XFree guys are not happy about this and want X.org to be "setting the standard" and xfree86 to be implementing the standard like in the old days.
Anyway the last official documented x.org standard is here.
Sorry, i was busy fucking your mom up the ass while writing my last reply.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're the terror of the 7th grade playground, I can totally tell. "Fucking my mom up the ass." I bet you pack 'em in every night at the Apollo. You're a regular Stagger Lee, boy! Let me know when your album comes out!
1) fact is that you want a complete from bottom to top desktop environment.
2) now that xfree adopted a lot of gnome shit with 4.3.0 i was assuming you were refering to gnome here as complete desktop from bottom to top.
3) that made me reply the way i did.
Maybe that sounded impressive (or at least coherant) in whatever your native language is?
I repeat: "Allow?" Nobody "allows" anybody to do anything with the X11 codebase. It's free. Allow me to demonstrate by example:
If the syphlitic chimpanzees you optimistically refer to as your parents decide that they want to fork XFree86, they don't have to check with you.
If the doctor who abandoned his responsibility to the human race by not strangling you at birth decides that he wants to merge XFree86 into the QNX kernel, you don't get to vet the decision.
If the makers of the hand cream that is your only sexual partner decide that they want to include a free CD of XF86 with every bottle of their lotion, they won't consult you.
If the crabs that infest your rancid pubic hair develop a group intelligence and decide to replace all of XF86's linked-list functions with wrapper calls to GLIB2, people will mostly feel sorry for the crabs for having had to grow up in such a bad neighborhood, and applaud their initiative.
And last but not least: if a group of people who actually produce working code instead of spending their time posting gibberish flames in broken english to slashdot decide to do anything whatsoever, nobody is going to give a rat's ass whether you think it should be "allowed" or not.
There are two morals to this story, child:
1. Don't complain about code that nobody is forcing you to use when there are plenty of alternatives available.
2. Don't try to play the dozens against strangers when your game is that weak. Come hard, or don't come at all.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
People need to stop complaining about X's fonts. Just use the same TrueType fonts you would use on OS X or Windows (some of them are free as in beer). RTF Font Deuglification HOWTO, for heaven's sake. Open Source fonts are a very, very difficult deal, as fonts need to be coherent from script to script, and have a single artistic vision behind them to be satisfactory.
No way, replace it with OpenGL and IO primitives. Frame buffer went out 10 years ago.
It's wrong to blame X for slowness. The real problem is the incredibly bloated and slow GUI apps and window managers, and possibly the modern GUI toolkits. Blackbox/Fluxbox/IceWM are very fast. Properly made X applications like xfig are very fast. The Mozilla family of apps has something pathologically wrong with it - nothing should be that slow. The Gnome/KDE stuff seems to me just barely acceptable on a fast machine, but clearly it's bloated and inefficient.
Quit blaming X. That's not where the speed problem is. As for difficult and complicated - your right. But mature technologies that properly handle a wide variety of cases tend to be that way.
I'd like to see DirectFB take off. ... ha! I don't know what most people are whinging about. X is incredibly fast on my computer. I run Enlightenment-0.16.5 and Enlightenment-0.17. And yeah I use network transparency a little. That's cool too. And my games run swift as lightning. Direct Rendering is sure working. Is X really that bad that people need to dump it and start again? I'm not convinced.
It looks pretty cool and is quite fast.
Don't know how practical it is or what issues are involved, but anyway if the X ship is sinking, I'm voting for DirectFB.
Of course the X boat is not sinking though.
All those who are sick of X can just stop using X, and see how you go
Quite frankly, the whole stink with XFree86 reminds me very much of ICANN. Technological snobs who won't listen to anyone else, have closed off public participation, aren't transparent, and now are defaming someone who rightly criticizes them. Furthermore, they are blundering. Why should Xfree86 drivers not be modularized? I only have one fucking video card. I don't need to download the drivers for every video-card Xfree86 supports. Xfree86 has also done an atrocious job of integrating the latest drivers from graphics chip corporations, like ATI. Their failure to promptly incorporate these drivers has alienated hardware developers. Why should ATI spend millions of dollars to make drivers for XFree86, if it takes them so long to incorporate them?
The actions of XFree86.org convince me that they want to restrict user choice in the GNU/Linux world, and prevent anyone else from running any X11-implementations other than XFree86. Their refusal to modularize drivers is one thing convincing me of this.
I can not think of any major projects which are as poor as XFree86 in regards to including the community and being accountable to the community. Many of the people within that "organization" are in fact figureheads who don't even believe in XFree86, like one of the founders linked to. If you don't use XFree86 at all, and only use Windows, then imo, you have no business being part of an XFree86 team.
Keith is right to fork off XFree86. He has tried to address his concerns from within the organization, and has been unable to do so. Just like Auerbach. There is only so much one crusader within an organization can do when the rest of the organization is bent on corruption.
XFree86 is proof that even a project covered under a license approved by the OSI and the FSF can be corrupt and non-transparent.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I find it kind of funny that a "parent" thread "forks" to create a "child".
hehe
Bad pun... I know
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Well, when you send data over an Unix socket, that data does not go over the file system, any more that write() to a TCP socket does. Don't get confused by the fact that the namespace of unix sockets is the same as the filesystem.
Also, you should note that the X11 Way(tm) reduces context switches because a whole bunch of operations are (usually) merged to a single message to the X server.
I generaly read articles about X that come up on slashdot and elsewhere, and a lot of terms and ideas get thrown around that I don't always understand. Can anybody recommend any websites, tutorials or books about X and diferent implementations of it?
Peace,
--Greg
It seems to me that all parties involved need to cool down and then come back to the table with a reasonable attitude and work out these issues. Keith has some valid points about the sluggish response of XFree86 development in certain areas, although I disagree with his means of protest. A fork would likely only cause chaos and be detrimental to the cause of unified desktop standards and Open Source acceptance. It is my opinion that there are times when standards and compatibility are far more important than performance and eye candy.
Keith, if you are listening, may I suggest that you formally and thoroughly document your objections to current XFree86 development and provide constructive criticism on how it might be improved? If there are technical complaints, such as relating to performance, perhaps you can write code to prove the need for change.
XFree86 team, if you are listening, may I suggest that a patch tracking feature be added to the official web site? For example, if a patch is submitted to support a new XRender feature but not yet committed to CVS, show this and offer the patch for download right there. As a user, it greatly frustrates me to not have any idea when new features and support will be added and you must admit, the XFree86 release cycle is rather slow. As a user/developer, it would be greatly beneficial to me if I could see precisely where the work is being done. And if extra help is needed in some area, advertise this openly. Relating specifically to driver patches, may I suggest that driver changes be added with far less caution than changes to core libraries? I personally believe that if someone like responsible like ATI submits a patch to support their latest hardware, there is absolutely no need to sit on that patch. Get it out there and get it tested ASAP.
Actually, I wouldn't desecrate my Linux system by using MS fonts. I use the Adobe TypeBasics fonts. I find them to be better suited to FreeType 2 (the pshinter has some intelligence the TT hinter without bytecode interpreter doesn't) and much better suited (thanks to their "general guideline" rather than pixel-specific hinting) to antialiased rendering on my high-res LCD. They're also a bit more elegant, IMHO, than the MS fonts.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
1. You're biased too--against ACs.
2. Unix IS on the way out. Has been for a decade.
There is no fork!
Before I start this, I have to make sure that people reading it actually "get" what XFree86 is. A lot of people who complain about X (in the generic sense) think that it IS the GUI. They see that X shaped cursor and the 50% gray background and think "ewwww!" But what they don't understand is that the "GUI", as they perceive it, is really an environment like KDE or GNOME. Assuming we are talking KDE... you need X for KDE to run and vice-versa. They are interdependent. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say "I like KDE better than X Windows". With that said:
After reading some of the comments on the OS News board, it seems to me that there are two needs arising out of the discussions:
-Continuing development of XFree86 and it's robust feature set (many of which are sadly lacking in Windows unfortunately)
-A completely new non-networkable direct rendered system (more like the Windows approach)
First of all, to make my case, I will tell you to think of it in terms of a standard console vs. a framebuffer console. They both have their place for two different types of users. In the same way, a system like XFree86 and some new direct rendered display system will have acceptance with certain kinds of users.
I, personally, love XFree86 and all it has to offer. It performs very well for me on a local workstation as well as over my home network and at my place of employ. Displays are easily exported on a per application or per session basis as needed. And with the LBX proxy, I can use it when VPNed into my workplace.
It's VERY flexible: I typically run 3-4 X servers on my workstation and laptop so that I can dedicate full screens for certain things at different resolutions or run under different users simultaneously on each display. (To those in the know: How's that for fast user switching? XP cough cough... :) Ctl-Alt-F8 and you are one user, Ctrl-Alt-F9 and you are another, etc...)
For example, if I am playing a game (Sierra's Lighthouse for instance) under Wine, I like to do it full screen, with no desktop environment at all. Just the game. What's even nicer is that I can actually make the display large enough the Lighthouse isn't a small window with black space around it, it almost becomes full screen. Same thing with Riven. All this while I still have IRC downloading the latest episode of Enterprise in another session as another user. All I need to do to check on my download progress is the Virtual Console key combo.
Now... I will say that if a project starts up to provide a direct rendered system. This could actually be a good thing. It would probably meet the needs of the generic home user fairly well, and remote desktop services could be provided by something like VNC or an RDP clone. I do admit that Joe Average is probably going to have little use now and in the future for X type capabilities. So, this new system should be packed with other "consumer" features. Specifically, the 3D support for games, DVD and MPEG acceleration where applicable and TV in/out support for cards that have such features. A project like this would do a lot to make Linux more palatable to the average consumer. All a distro would have to do then is break down their distros into categories (RedHat for example):
-RedHat "Lite" - A distro for the average consumer that is rypically pre-installed on new systems. No X, no devel tools, no servers, just a very basic OS that allows them to safely get on the Internet, run some productivity apps and play some games.
-RedHat "WS" - As it exists currently. With X (just the direct rendering system that people are alluding to), devel tools, basic servers and some of the enterprise features that power users crave.
-RedHat "Collection" - Capable of installing every distro from one set of disks. You just choose which distro combo you want.
So... don't bash X because you don't understand it. It's a great system with a great feature set. It would be nice to see 3D acceleration networkable or even clusterable though...
Un-news
Reading Wexelblats email where he basically tells people that this is none of their business, is like hearing an echo of the argumentation launched against new bylaws in the FreeBSD project.
If David is not actively contributing to XFree86, he has no business telling anyone how to run the project.
I think the active developers of XFree86, both committer and non-committers, should grab a copy of the FreeBSD bylaws and elect a new core team.
The FreeBSD bylaws are far from perfect, but it would be enough to get started and once the dust has settled, a revision to more closely match the needs of the new project can be made.
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
This seems to be the opinion of a windows using non-coder who disparages the project yet is somehow mysteriously on the "core team", versus the foremost developer of the project who was kicked off said team.
This case was totally open and shut to me.
Code talks.
Plus come on, can you take someone named "Wexelblat" seriously?
XFree is probably not the problem. I'm running debian unstable with kernel 2.65 (preemptible + linus desktop improvement patch), kde 3.1 with mosfets high performance liquid style engine, optimized nvidia drivers and Xfree 4.2.x atm and it is incredibly fast on my machine.
:)
ok, it's an athlon xp 1800+, but it is way smoother that windows XP running on the same machine, and i would describe the "feeled" improvements as follows:
XFree 4.2: can't recognize any speed differences
nvkernel: opengl support, no differences for ui
preempt: avoids glitches on heavy load, a must
2.5.65 kernel: ui stays responsive even on heavy load, very cool.
liquid style engine: incredible performance boost.
the whole kde ui gets rocket fast and responsive after switching to it. just try it!
sure, it's bleeding edge system, but i have no stability problems atm and kernel 2.5/2.6 will be in distributions soon, too...
> Yeah, it's soooo easy to do it too.
It sure is.
cp ARIAL.TTF ~/.fonts
Shameless, thou art. You missed out on the score 5 informative, and the score 3 interesting. Welcome to the Redundant and off-topic mods.
:(
Yeah, I didn't type fast enough
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Thank you and the parent poster, I actually learned something! :)
Te"doesn't even have an account"ls
David Wexelblat is in the Xfree BoD. He's also a core-developer. He flamed Keith Packard because of what he has done. What has Keith Packard done for Xfree recently? Among others:
a) Fontconfig
b) RENDER-extension
c) Xft
d) Work on transparency
What has Wexelblat done recently? According to his owns words:
a) He hasn't hacked Xfree in years
b) He uses Windows these days
c) If he will code something (unlikely), it will be for Windows
d) Only thing he does related to Xfree is to lurk in the core-devel mailing-list
And here we have Wexelblat flaming Packard! Hello!?! Of the two, it seems that Packard cares ALOT more about Xfree than Wexelblat does! He actually works on it and improves Xfree, while Wexelblat plays Myst on Windows! Looking at their recent activities, Wexelblat should just shut the hell up. He hasn't done a thing, who the hell is he criticizing Packard!?
Wexelblat should be kicked out of the BoD and Core and replaced by someone who wants to work on the project and improve it! It's no wonder Xfree has stagnated if there are core-members like Wexelblat who haven't contributed to the project in years! Ironically, it was he (if I remember correctly, could have been someone else as well) who kept reminding that "Xfree is a meritocracy". If it's a meritocracy, why are there useless deadbeats like Wexelblat in Core? Because of their past accomplishments? Maybe Wexelblat was an uber-hacker 10 years ago, but TODAY, he contributes nothing to the project.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
FreeBSD is a peripheral enough project that there isn't the kind of politics that leads to people stacking meetings and staging votes.
Apache and every single project within the Apache Foundation work off a democratic basis - that's a lot of people and a lot of politics, but it all works brilliantly.
My hardware is a G400 (I like the dual display) and Athlon 1800+. I get virtually identical results. At first I assumed (because a G400 shouldn't be anywhere near a Radeon!) that it was CPU-bound, but then I tried a remote-invocation as well, and got virtually the same results (see below). There's a 100mbit link between the two machines, if that matters...
:0.0
This implies to me that there is a limitation on the number of requests per second that the X-server (irrespective of driver) can do, and that perhaps should be addressed. Either that, or a G400 really is the same speed as radeon 8500... The link to 'tanelorn' is via ssh as well (so it's encrypting and decrypting everything in the protocol stream...)
[simon@atlantis ~]$ x11perf -eschertilerect500
x11perf - X11 performance program, version 1.5
The XFree86 Project, Inc server version 40200000 on
from atlantis.mythology.gornall.net
Sat Mar 22 11:03:29 2003
Sync time adjustment is 0.0537 msecs.
8000 reps @ 0.6795 msec ( 1470.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
8000 reps @ 0.6850 msec ( 1460.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
8000 reps @ 0.6794 msec ( 1470.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
8000 reps @ 0.7947 msec ( 1260.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
8000 reps @ 0.6966 msec ( 1440.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
40000 trep @ 0.7070 msec ( 1410.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
[root@tanelorn denyaccess]# x11perf -eschertilerect500
x11perf - X11 performance program, version 1.5
The XFree86 Project, Inc server version 40200000 on localhost:11.0
from tanelorn.mythology.gornall.net
Sun Mar 23 11:10:28 2003
Sync time adjustment is 1.1608 msecs.
8000 reps @ 0.6954 msec ( 1440.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
8000 reps @ 0.7964 msec ( 1260.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
8000 reps @ 0.6852 msec ( 1460.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
8000 reps @ 0.6833 msec ( 1460.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
8000 reps @ 0.6844 msec ( 1460.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
40000 trep @ 0.7089 msec ( 1410.0/sec): 500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
One other thing. I *like* X. I really couldn't live without the network transparency - editing files in co-located facilities via ssh with X-forwarding is just *so* much nicer than using 'vi'...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
You've just described exactly what's wrong with X's fonts. "Read the Font Deuglification HOWTO"... why the hell should you even need a HOWTO just to make the fonts look right? And even if you do use the same TT fonts, they are rendered horribly. On Windows, I just put the fonts in c:\windows\fonts, and they're instantly accessible, well-rendered and anti-aliased, everywhere. No messing with source code, no patches, no obscure configurations, it just works.
X is seriously fucked up, it either needs completely overhauling, or replacing.
OK, I've read quite a few threats now about
...doh!
"X == slow" => "X == obsolete" vs. "X == fast" => "X == cool"
and I think it's time to clear things up a little. First off, I'd like to say that it demonstrates the pointlessness of this discussion that I, of all people, should clear this up. I'm just a simple X user, but it seems like I'm the first one coming up with this perspective.
(X != fast) && (X != slow)!!
The speed of X11 mainly seems to be depending upon support for your particular card. If you have a super duper Radion/ ATI/ Whatever BlasterMaster with five fans and a built-in coffee machine, and the X11 support doesn't go beyond primary SVGA, well
If you find it ridiculous that your $$$ card is far less well supported than my cheap-o built-in Trident or ancient ATI Rage II, you can't blame the structure of X for it. You may be able to blame the structure of the development for not supporting as much hardware as you should like. But hey, guess what, that's what's going on right now!
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Yeah. FreeBSD, debian are two of the biggest example where core is elected.
It clearly look that, as alan cox said, david have lost contact with X. He is now an open-source advocate, a free software hater (he says that in the thread) and an exclusive windows user.
That beeing said, the motivations for the fork() are not clear either. What I beleive is the problem, is that the XFree core team is overloaded with work because part of the team went working on other things. Young wolfes are pressing them to resign the control of the project, which they are not ready to do.
IMNSHO, they are right. Slow dev is better than fast and loose. Wanabees generally think that can do the right thing, without understanding that managing people (because core is about mangement) and driving a project is hard. And the more people commit, the harder it is.
This thread is really exciting with lots of agression being worked out. I need to point out that XFree86 has been really fabulous for me. I have used Linux since 95 (Caldera, Redhat, now Suse) and I could not be as productive as I am without it. I have never had a problem with the windows. (I use KDE). I read my mail (kmail), browse the web (Mozilla/Konqueror). But mostly I use xterm/kconsole. I may not be in a majority, but I am one of a sizable number of users (English speaking) who don't experience any of the problems described in this thread. I don't want to go on, but You guys have done a fantastic job. Work it out. As dogbert would say, 'try to separate the personality from the problem'.
Most of you would agree that Macs are the prettiest things to look at. So, my question is: What are the differences between Xfree86 and Quartz (is that the correct name?) and why can Apple give a little back to linux instead of only taking? One thing that bothers me is that Linux can boost the performance of a not so recent machine, but it's usually the other way around when it comes to the graphical environment. (Talking with some experience). I just would like to add that I also think Xfree86 should be modularised and that most drivers (expect the old VGA) should in separate modules.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Explorer/shell replacements are in no way analogous to an X server. You might call them "window managers" if you like, but that's as far as it can go.
I agree. In my previous job my main working machine was a Win2k box with PuTTY and a commercial X server installed. It's actually a very nice environment to work in -- I could use Explorer to administer and manage files on my remote linux server, editing PHP code with my favourite Win text editor (ConTEXT) and at the same time using Outlook (not my fave, but the company standard), and develop Win32 code. Best of both worlds. Plus I got to wow all my surrounding Windoze-only colleagues with impressive looking KDE themes!
Without X's network transparency, I'd be upstairs on the linux box half the time, separated from colleagues, and reducing my efficiency.
The only downside -- having to walk upstairs to change CDs occasionally!
However, I also see the need for a slimmer, leaner, meaner X, with a fast (perhaps even kernel-level?) direct rendering system, with less cruft. I have a lowly PIII 550 256Mb at home, and X is a bit of a pig; whereas Win2K's GUI just whizzes along nicely.
I don't necessarily think that network transparency + a fast GUI are mutually exclusive. Surely it's possible to come up with a high-speed rendering and input API that could be controlled remotely via a swappable
I can envisage something like an OpenGL-like pipeline, with a serialised command input, that could be streamed to a specialised hardware accelerated layer on the local machine, or via network to a remote display server? The remote server could afford to be quite minimal in this scenario - a glorified video driver with support for input devices. Surely most of the code necessary for a prototype of this system is already out there?
the number of ppl who wish to kill X while MS is struggling to get remote windows and multi user right. If X was such a disaster, then some group would spring up with lots of backing and take over (think KDE/GNOME). This forking is normal in the course of things. I suspect that Keith's work will shake up X and for a time, there will be 2 projects, but they will either merge back or work together.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The AtheOS get_msg_x(), send_msg_x() IPC has a much lower overhead than UNIX sockets, thats for certain. However, that is not the deciding facter in making the GUI more responsive than X; the kernel, appserver and libatheos are all heavily threaded, and the OS is tuned to suit a desktop user (E..g low latency at the expense of more context switches).
;D I would certainly be interested in seeing some real objective comparisions between Message Ports and UNIX Sockets, though.
As I'm posting this from a Syllable box with ABrowse, I can only really say that it feels much faster and more responsive than X. I am subjective and heavily biased however, so please take that with as many sacks of salt as you require
Syllable : It's an Operating System
X has nothing whatsoever to do with the look and behaviour of your widgets and dialogs. It is a graphics backend that renders them for the window managers which are the ones determining their look and behaviour. All these people screaming about how X sucks are misunderstanding the issue and blaming the wrong piece of software.
Anti-aliasing is no substitute for hinting. XFree86 fonts will continue to look like shit until Apple's patent expires.
So then it's not XFree86's fault, is it?
Where do you get these Adobe TypeBasics fonts?
Windows is a programming platform for applications and drivers.
Linux is an operating system with heaps of stuff on it.
Windows happens to have an operating system in it, but nobody really cares about it. The programming platform is the important part.
Linux's greatest obstacle to widespread desktop acceptance is standardizing on a set of libraries and calls to turn it into a platform. Then application developers could do wild stuff like cut-and-paste graphics, or plug into the menu system, or.... adjust the volume on the soundcard.
Don't forget that you can get sporks at Tao Bell
(Yeah, I know, my post is going to be modded -1 Off-Topic.)
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
(IMHO, mod up 3 Funny) ;)
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
So the lives of people who put other people though plastic shredders are worth more than those wo dont? Yeah, right, Fuck YOU!
Damn, replace the word"more" with the word "same"
I must say X-windows performance sucks compared to MS Windows. I know what you pro X camp are going to say...that I'm naive, misled and even ignorant. But tell you a secret, us ignorant folks are growing every day.
The more Linux is being adopted, the more people like me are going to ask why X windows is slower than MS Windows. Each day, we grow by the thousands while you guys increase by a handful. Soon we will drown you out!
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
From the man himself ...
mx
I've noticed that the Sun developers are trying to use this moment of discord to get STSF reconsidered. However, STSF is junk. Even if it were not junk, Xft has already been adopted as the font engine for X. Trying to replace it now with something that's much more complex (and doesn't do anything more useful) makes no sense whatsoever.
I don't agree with the people who say that X is bloated, lacks performance, and cannot be fixed, so we need to throw it out and start over. But if STSF were added to it then it WOULD be time to take it out back and put a bullet in it. In many situations the current versions of STSF can reduce text processing to a snail's pace.
X is a piece of $#17, we should scrap is as soon as possible.
case in point:
my brand new Supermicro P4 system, 512MB DDR SDRAM, Intel 845 graphics on board.
Tux Racer on Win2k gets about 20 FPS.
Tux Racer on RH 8.0 gets LESS THAN 1 FPS!
X sucks, it's a piece of shit!
(announcer voice)
Stay tuned for more 'As the X forks' after these messages...
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
[[
f}fCfNÌfefXfg'
You can walk to your local CompUSA or order online.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
First, the American army will be killing a whole bunch of civilians in this conflict, while the Iraqi army won't (the war is nowhere near US soil). Second, I was thinking more of civilians than anybody else. Even conservative estimates put the civilian casualty in Iraq at 1000-3000. We're giving Iraq their own personal 9-11 (3005 civilian casualties).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
[ me looks at trade floor, 2000 machines using Exceed ..]
[... now me checks how many development sessions are running in one server. Yeah, 200. All runing on this machine controlled fomr Winddows machines with Exceed...]
Sure, nobody dude.
Whatever.
why is it not based on OpenGL?
You would not even need to have the complicated hardware abstraction crap.
Did I say MS fonts? I said "TrueType" fonts.
You can theretically run a lower resolution in X under Xnest (Xnest -ac -depth 8 :1) but need the right hardware and drivers. Has anyone had any luck using Xnest this way? On what sort of hardware did it work?
It's very, very different. I myself prefer to keep the real screen size as a virtual desktop when I zoom in, so perhaps the developers didn't see what you are asking for as a worthwhile feature. An application (eg. any Loki game) can resize the screen in X quite happily, but the user is limited to stopping and restarting the server with different options.Well, when you send data over an Unix socket, that data does not go over the file system, any more that write() to a TCP socket does.
Sockets are certainly exposed for access in the VFS layer. It's cool and handy, but I reckon performance will be attenuated by the VFS layer.
Or do I reckon wrong?
I hope toolkit developers can get together to use a common config file format for look-and-feel stuff, and provide sensible defaults (Windows-like, Vi-like, Emacs-like, Motif-like, etc.). This way, programmers can just choose the toolkit they like best, be it GTK, Qt, Motif or Swing (it is hard to bring together the latter two, though), and users will not mind which one is actually used.
There are at least 3 different modes for AA under X, which ones have you tried? It makes a huge performance difference on this nForce2 chipset.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
http://www.xfork86.org/?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You reckon wrong. The local socket operation is basically a memcpy() operation.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
As an example of where X is useful on a low end PC: On Friday on the local machine I was running concurrently 3 copies of X (one nested) with three different window managers with apps from 8 different machines with three very different operating systems. The machine was responsive enough that I don't notice any lag at all, but I wouldn't want to use a similar machine for 3D games newer than Quake][. On a usual day I would run no more than 2 copies of X, and two window managers, and when a very old, very expensive but very useful scientific application is upgraded I will only need one. This application will not run on the local machine at better than glacial speed, let alone disk size considerations, and having a top end PC for everyone that needs to use that application would cost a lot, but no more than a few percent of the licencing costs for each new copy that would be needed.
My co-workers who use windows also use a version of X to get their work done, only they can't work in both 8 bit and 32 bit without closing applications and going into the windows control panel. If their windows video driver and hardware supported overlays they wouldn't need to do that. The desktops run the range from pentium 166 with 32MB up to dual processor atholons, and all run at a good pace in X, since the real work is done on a server and the local machine just does the display for the serious applications. Local stuff, of course, isn't done at the same speed, and the local stuff decides the OS (eg. MS if you need powerpoint). XFree86 on windows in not yet at a stage where it would be as useful to them as the commercial X servers, but it is rapidly getting there. XFree86 runs on five of the machines they use every day, and happily feeds them the windows they need.
To sum up - X and MS Windows are very different things, about a third of the people I work with use both at once on the same screen.
If you read my other post (above in main thread), you'll see I have also used X in a similar way extensively, and I actually agree with most of your points. But I believe it can be done more efficiently than in the current architecture. An X server running on Win32 is a very nice environment to work in.
I know all the above layers are not part of "X itself", but they are a kind of byproduct. you can't have a decent desktop environment based on X without a whole wodge of layers between the app and X. It isn't necessarily X that slows everything down, BUT the nature of the X window system compels you to use these layers, and the limited scope of X means that it is not possible to implement such layers in an optimal way.
A limitation in any of those software layers propogates all the way to the top of the stack (software design 101), so improving the X architecture to provide things like AA fonts, better image caching, faster (and more useful) graphics operations and features (like alpha channel) as standard allows higher software levels to take advantage of those features.
However, I also believe that we could do away with most of those layers if you take a step back and look at the whole picture and have a bit of a rethink.
I also think that Linux badly needs a unified display architecture with a common set of libraries for framebuffer access and video driver development regardless of whether you're running X, or any other display API.
Basically, I don't believe in "good enough". I want the best! I know its a difficult problem -- no-one will use a new desktop/display environment until it has decent support; and no-one will support something that isn't being used... I guess we just have to keep on improving X and see what happens. I don't think at this stage it's possible to create a new desktop that blows people away with awe such that they'll shift environments...
Ho hum.
Oh I don't know.. It's a pretty large group of committers (375 or so?).
:)
Anyway, my government tells immigrants whether they may or may not be a citizen, at which time those immigrants have voting rights to elect a new government.
The only real difference is that you cannot be born a BSD Committer -- but must prove yourself worthy first
Rod Taylor
1. Disband the steering committee
2. Announce open seats on the new "get out and push" committee.
For me, I'll just be happy with a working Xnest or other solution that lets me do overlays of different bit depths. Must read more about X, and look at code.
You've got blinders on, pal. Unix is the past and future of microcomputer operating systems, rolled into one.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
The nice things about X is that you could run it equally well over a native messaging system, if you had one.
:-)
However, that is not the deciding facter in making the GUI more responsive than X; the kernel, appserver and libatheos are all heavily threaded,
As a wise man said, "threads and stupid people attract each other." It *may* make your GUI feel more responsive, but at the expensive of being much harder to get all the bugs out. It's very unclear that putting the same amount of effort into a non-threaded program would not get you better results.
A Microsoft staff engineer in the SecurityOffice leaked memos said that they deeply regretted choosing a heavily threaded architecture because it was very difficult to achieve the same levels of stability that people are accustomed to on Unix.
I can only really say that it feels much faster
I'm glad you can acknowledge that you're biased.
Does ABrowse support all the standards that Mozilla does? Just the amount of processing that it has to do was substantially responsible for slowdowns in earlier versions.
I would certainly be interested in seeing some real objective comparisions between Message Ports and UNIX Sockets, though.
I've just been reading "Undocumented NT". It has a fair bit of discussion of the ugly hacks and special cases that the NT team had to put into their message-passing microkernel system to make it perform adequately well.
As a wise man said, "threads and stupid people attract each other."
:) However when you're dealing with a desktop user, they generally want a computer to respond quickly. Most users don't care too much if that Word document takes an extra second to open, though. So its a tradeoff, and obviously you have to balance it towards the target audience. Syllable chooses to favour response times over raw processing ; Linux generally chooses the inverse.
:)
;)
:)
Indeed
Does ABrowse support all the standards that Mozilla does? Just the amount of processing that it has to do was substantially responsible for slowdowns in earlier versions.
ABrowse is based on an (Older) Khtml engine which has been wrapped to make it a native application. As it was originally a Qt application, and Qt isn't thread safe, all the code is syncronised around a single mutex anyway. So there is no advantage to the threaded model there. Still, ABrowse is fast and can happilly render Slashdot just as fast as Mozilla does on Linux. As I said though, I'm biased
As for NT, well that was originally a "pure" microkernel design. Even the kernel uses object and messages internally. Syllable doesn't bother with all that, but it does provide a set of calls that userspace stuff can use. I've also had very few problems with the threaded and rentrent model of both the kernel and the user space library. One golden rule is that if you're not sure, lock
Anyway, enough of that. Slashdot is not the best place for time-lagged discussions; I encourage you to use the forums on the website or the mailing lists if you're interested in the Syllable architecture; the link is in my sig
Syllable : It's an Operating System
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice
and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the
master calls a butterfly.
-- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...