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Frontiers: A New Xlib Compatible Window System

Posted by timothy on from the but-x-is-so-versatile dept.

alucard writes "The JourneyOS people have published this overview of their upcoming window system. It looks like it is OpenGL based and uses XML as the communications protocol. The biggest news is that it is supposed to have Xlib compatibility, but uses HyperQueues instead of Unix domain sockets. Could this get rid of the speed problems of XFree86 while still retaining Xlib compatibility? I think this is something everyone wants, but projects to create alternative GUIs such as Fresco and PicoGUI have given up any hope of compatibility with X11 or Xlib. Can we expect another alternative out there soon?"

3 of 439 comments (clear)

  1. try Quake3 over X- THEN tell me X sucks. by SlightOverdose · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah sure. in THEORY, the server-client overhead of X slows it down. I have, however, yet to notice it. Hell, I get a Higher framerate with Quake3 in Linux than in win32.

    To take the quake3 thing a bit further- one day I was setting up a quake3 server on a remote machine. However instead of running q3ded (the server), I ran quake3.x86 (the client) by mistake.

    Imagine my horror when the screen goes blank and I realise what I have done, and SURELY, this would fsck both boxes. Theres no way quake3 can X over a 100mbit network link (with the overhead of SSH thrown in). Or can it?

    A few seconds later up pops the menu. It ran fine. As a quick experiment, I loaded q3dm17. It worked, and I was getting a good 15fps- quite playable.

    Dont believe me? try it for yourself.

    I think that little demo alone is enough of a demonstration. X my have it's flaws- namely bloatedness, but it CERTAINLY doesn't seem slow to me.

  2. WBXML by DrXym · · Score: 5, Interesting
    WBXML compresses XML down to bytecodes. It's used in WAP and other places. It works off the DTD, assigning bytes to represent the various tags and attributes.


    But even if it were plain old text XML, it still poses some real advantages, not least of which you could transport it over SSL, web proxies and other barriers that would stop an X-session cold.


    Besides which the transport is probably not as important as the data you are send. If the schema had sophisticated drawing primitives ala SVG you might find it is considerably faster than X which might be forced to move bitmap data around for similar operations.

  3. Re:Oh. my. god. by vidarh · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The X protocol IS extensible. Exactly what do you think the shared memory extension uses? Or Xv? Or DRI? Or XRender? The X protocol was designed specifically with extension in mind. Now, I can think of quite a few thing in the X protocol that sucks, but lack of extensibility is not one of them.

    The "slowdown" of optimizations for X is not a result of the protocol, but of the complexity of the task. Look at all the alternative GUI's available for Linux, and take a look at the number of drivers they support and the feature set - most of them are highly specialized because the amount of work that needs to go into a general purpose GUI system to make it useful is simply staggering, and few people have the skills to do it well.

    Extending the X protocol is the easy, almost trivial, bit.