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Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc
An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9791
has alot of responces from raster on this subject so its worth a read and there also seems to be some progress on the whole debate
Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.
Ah, thanks for qualifying this. Now it is about as clear as a galaxy full of dark matter.
Anyone else think this article sounded a bit more superhero than it turned out to be?
"Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc"
RasterMan, defender of good finally reengages his age old enemies Seth, and his evil master Havoc.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
If X is slow its more then likely your setup and not X its self. Don't belive me? Run Fluxbox instead of Gnome or KDE and see how responsive it becomes. Now run a Gnome or KDE that was compiled for a more sane arch, ie i686 instead of i386 and see how much more responsive it becomes. Now run RDC and XDMCP side by side and see how well the Xprotocol works. X is not slow. I run KDE 3.4b2 on a dual p2 with 768 mb ram with a lot of eye candy turned on, I run an XDMCP session to a Sun box running Solaris 8 and right next to it, XP on a Sempron 2500+. I see no UI responsiveness difference until the systems become busy, and then its often XP that first slows.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Tuesday, 22 February 2005
:) He mentions "A sophisticated drawing layer" (read his blog for the full text). We have that - Evas. it can accelerate via OpenGL, it's got a FAST software renderer. It can render to the Linux Framebuffer. It can render to memory. It can render using DirectFB. It can render using *GASP* ... Cairo! It can display in Qtopia. We can add new engines for new targets with little effort. Evas scales down to rendering at usable speeds on embedded devices (100-600Mhz ARM CPU's, limited RAM etc.). He discusses a toolkit that aggressively takes advantage of this - we have been working on EWL and Edje. Edje is a lower layer theme/layout system, with EWL being a full widget set on top of this, giving you whiz-bang themes with widget layout built on top of an Evas canvas with everything punting down to the rendering layer at the bottom there. We are doing our own Window Manager - and the day Xrender stops sucking, we will add compositing to it too - re-using all the layers we already have to do this. We have a low level acceleration mechanism (OpenGL) but its too unstable for use IMHO. This is a problem that needs fixing and is something that needs to be addressed.
:) Hundreds of snowflakes driving down the screen... E17 has a toy module for just this... and flames to burn them up as they hit the bottom of the screen. All with glorious alpha blending. He speaks of animated background desktops with things like grass blowing in the breeze - We do that already in E17. The desktop BG is an Edje file - and thus is capable of all the animation and effects Edje and Evas offer. In fact take a look at the following 2 video files (they are jerky because xvidcap is jerky and thats just how it is - in real life they are smooth as a babies bottom - you just have to see these things "live" to believe it. Also note - this has NO hardware acceleration. I am hoping one day to have acceleration available that is good enough for production use).
Enlightenment the experimental toolkit
Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.
What I'll go into is some of the things Seth and Havoc talk about that we have already done and are well under way or very mature. Things we have advocated for years and have already solved - quite optimally. Our designs are forward-looking and just WAITING for drivers to catch up and stop "sucking". I could write essays about the many ways to address this issue alone (XRender), but I won't go there this time. I've been there before.
First let me talk about Seth's blog. He discusses "Next-Generation Rendering For the Free Desktop". This is great. this is just what we need... oh wait. it's just what we've been DOING for years!
Now he goes on to say what this will enable: "Toolkit themes that draw with layer blending effects" - Done. EWL, Evas, Edje. "Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly and animated clouds of smoke when you click on them". OK - we don't have the smoke - but we have all the animation, glinting in the light, fading, glowing, sliding, etc. etc. etc. We have an entire engine devoted to just this (Edje), a theme description language, compiler, scripting engine, compressed theme format usable "live" without installation etc. He goes on to talk of "Alpha transparency whenever you want" - Done. Evas. Live window thumbnails - XRender has to improve something WICKED for this to be sane.
files/e17_movie-02.avi
files/e17_mov
I can see where he is coming from, but for all the hype the E team generate over their amazing new libraries, how many apps actually use them? As far as I can tell, basically none. I don't know why that is though.
the vids on his site are amazing! the theme he's got on there is ugly as sin, but seeing through that and looking at the tech behined the whole thing, and you see what the future could be.
all the nice effects that mac and longhorn will be doing next year could be tied into xorg/gnome within 6 months.
all rasters stuff is on freedesktop.org, so it's all open.
in a perfect world, someone like novell would hire raster to work with the gnome xorg devs. get evas+cairo into the desktop stack, and have gnome 2.12 running with some amazing eyecandy.
i wish i was but oh well
You, sir, are a magnificent bastard and a glorious ass.
It only sounds resentful if you are looking for resentment. It is a simple matter of fact -- he could not afford it as he and his project are not funded.
Another fact: his lack of funding is contrasted by the fact that others, who are only now investingating issues he has already implemented are well funded.
It is what it is -- factual. So keep your "you got what you asked for" attitude to yourself, thank-you very much.
And in other news:
e17 to ship with Duke Nukem Forever!
Rasterman, you're brilliant; but in the immortal words of Guillermo Díaz :
Wrap it up B!
put the what in the where?
even better, vidcaps
rasterman's page is slashdotted, but mirrordot to the rescue..
If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money. That's your choice. But dont complain about it.
Open source is not an end itself. With some celebrity exceptions, open source exists because someone solved a problem--often a business problem--and released the solution to the public.
Why would they give it away? Because they have no interest in trying to sell it. Selling shrinkwrap software is a tough business, most people would rather focus on whatever it is they're better at. They stand to gain much more by open sourcing it than they would keeping it in a vault, or trying to sell it.
That's part of the problem. While Raster's done a magnificent job -- and frankly, it's pretty mind-blowing -- he's completely not concerned about backwards compatibility regarding toolsets. Again, what he's done is amazing but it's basically a canvas, not a traditional toolkit.
The OSS GUI world is so deeply rooted in Qt/KDE and GTK+/Gnome that there's no chance at *all* that people will adopt his APIs for the next gen display system.
Red Hat's people are concerned with achieving this kind of stuff without too deeply breaking source compatibility. If they can pull that off, my hat's off to them.
That said, red hat's people can learn a *lot* by working with Raster. Clearly, his code is fast, and his technical design's good. But the model is likely inapplicable to traditional widget toolkits.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly. I can't do it under WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME or even E17, and the problems are in the X Server
/compositing model currently used.
I haven't used Windows in years, but when i do see it, the thing that stands out is that desktop rendering is noticeably faster and smoother than any X server I have, excepting maybe my SGI O2 running IRIX.
I also have an iBook running OS X, and while it has problems resizing windows really smoothly (though i can't visibly see repaints like I can under X), everything else feels a lot faster and slicker than XFree86/Xorg etc.
Now, i'm sure it's not the X protocol that is the problem, but the difficulty in synchronising X windows to the VBI and also in the extremely poor implementation of alpha-blending and the rendering
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
More like infamy - at least to anyone that's followed E's development for any significant period of time.
Get something working, then throw it out and start over. Repeat constantly until any semblance to the original working copy is destroyed and all their dedicated beta (alpha/cvs) users are alienated to the point of not even using the "stable" (beta) E release.
That said, the Enlightenment team has turned out some amazing work (imlib2, etc.), and it's a shame to see the recycling destruction that takes place. If they were to be lest "artistic" and concentrate more on getting something working for the masses "out the door", E would still be an incredible and highly-advanced wm. We'd likely also have a slew of 3rd party apps built with imlib2 (et al), all on top of technology which would blow away gtk and qt. It's really too bad nobody forked the project and took what was good from E as they went along to create something perminant.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well, a lot of e16 libraries are widely used on *NIX. ImLib2 is the top example. If the e17 core libraries are half as good as promised, you can bet you'll see them used a lot aswell.
;)
Yesterday, just for the sake of it, i emerged (installed on Gentoo) Evidence, e17's to-be file manager. I was hoping to get a glimpse of the e's login manager (Entrance), but for some reason i typed Evidence. It looks great, and even silly things like clicking on an icon and see it zooming transparently in the background makes you see what these guys can do with e's core libraries. Rasterman is right, what the X team is talking about as "next gen rendering", they can do now. He's well entitled to want to make it public.
And yes, one has to give kudos to Rasterman and the whole e17 team for that matter. They are putting a lot of work into e17, and it shows. I just hope they just finish it someday
Frankly, I don't think there _is_ a speed issue with X11. There are performance issues on XFree86/XOrg with some (many) drivers, AFAIK mostly due to limited developer time and limited access to hardware. The fact that the current software RENDER implementation is not signficantly optimised, and few drivers implement RENDER hardware acceleration, does not help.
Working on my NVidia equpped box here (GeForce Ti, nvidia drivers, but for 2D 'nv' is almost as good) X is much snappier than I usually find WinXP to be. Turning on RENDER acceleration has helped a lot.
I'm sure folks will bring up the "because of the network" myth up here, so let's get this straight - any slowness in X is not because of network support. Go ask Keith Packard, I'm pretty sure he's been rather clear on the matter more than once. My personal, very much non-expert understanding is that most performance issues peope experience are due to limited hardware acceleration and inferior drivers.
If you don't believe me about how much difference the hardware and drivers make, go find an S3 based system, preferably S3 Trio32/S3 Trio64, and compare it to a PCI-based (to keep it fair) NVidia GeForce 4 MX on the same hardware. It's like they're two totally different computers - the change is jaw-dropping. I use thin clients a lot, so I care strongly about video performance and tend to notice these things.
It's also worth noting that hopefully many of these plans will lead indirectly to performance improvements, by making RENDER acceleration and RENDER optimisation pretty much mandatory.
Last Fall, I had a serious focus bug in Enlightenment (e16) that would lock my mouse to a particular region of the screen and require X server restarts. It would usually happen at the worst time, when I was working fast (busy!).
I worked with e-team member Kim Woelders on the problem and he produced a couple of patches after I sent him some good reproducible test cases. We exchanged a total of 39 email messages and it was finally fixed. I'd usually have a patch within 24 hours of sending him a test case.
All of that while they are busy trying to get e17 out. The work that the team does is amazing and I am very grateful.
To say that I am a fan is an understatement!
Rasterman left Redhat because he felt noone there really followed his vision of an X desktop. Here we are years later and we've come full circle. Now, many (if not most) users in the community are looking for highly customizable desktop eyecandy and Gnome, KDE, and Xorg are all out there trying to deliver on what Rasterman was doing 3 years ago.
Anecdotes != Data
I can easily counter that on my dual-boot system with Windows XP, Fedora, and a tweaked Gentoo, both Linux distro's are far, far more "sluggish" than Windows is. Oddly enough, what gives Windows a real kick in responsiveness is the I/O subsystem. Running Windows 2000 on a 400Mhz PII laptop was dog slow. Running Windows XP on a 400Mhz PII with SCSI RAID underneath and it flies. Linux/X11 does not on the same hardware, regardless of optimizations, distros, windowing managers, etc. I use this largely as a plaything, and as such have played with a LOT of distros, tweaks, and window managers over time.
So are you right? Am I right? We don't know. Does anyone have *real* data or studies on this, or just a bunch of anecdotes?
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
X. Is not. Network Based.
Not on the local machine. For local displays it doesn't use any networking at all. It uses UNIX pipes which are very fast and also DRI (Direct Rendering Interface) to talk directly to the video hardware.
I wish this myth would disappear. X only uses networking when using it over a network.
University - a box of academia nuts.
First of all, did I just read a story that gave all the background to Rasterman's response, but left out the actual response itself? Nice.
I've always liked the Enlightenment project, and I try to keep up-to-date with what's going on (which is not easy), but it seems pretty clear to me that it will not be the future of the Linux desktop.
E is not really a valid option for the OSS world - I wouldn't be surprised if more people were using XFce or Rox than E at this point. Sure, Linux itself has proven that if something new and amazing comes around and blows everything away by a large margin it may have a *hope* of shifting the momentum, but as great as E is, I doubt it is that impressive.
The reason why the framework Seth+Havoc describe will win over the E stack is because it is integrative, whereas E is not. When the next-generation X rendering system is in place, it will be available to everyone who uses those extensions. Probably by the time Damage + Composite are enabled by default on X, the latest KDE + gnome desktops will have support for them. And all the applications in those respective desktops will quickly (if not instantly) gain those advantages. Remember when the same thing happened with anti-aliased fonts a few years ago?
Yes, you can get the E magic right now, but you have to go through E. As long as they remain the sole gatekeepers, you can expect them to have the same extremely limited influence they have now. At this point in the game, I seriously doubt they can beat the inertia from the other desktops. Honestly, if you're developing a new application, are you going to develop for the mature and distributed kde or gnome desktop environments, or will you use E, which is available now with some ephemeral advantages but some serious disadvantages?
It's also true that by using E you're not committed to using _only_ E, but then, what's the point? If you use E + some random GTK application, you're not going to get the consistent graphical features until GTK itself gets those features... but at that point all gnome applications will have them.
The example of the Cathedral and the Bazaar is a good metaphor for these differing stacks. It seems to me the E project has always been fiercly exclusive in the way it does things - the whole Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are the best example of reinventing the wheel with E technologies. But the cost they've paid is limited deployment, slower releases, less interest and a rather narrow development strategy. Certainly that may suite some people fine. However, with that in mind I don't know how reasonable it is for Raster to be calling sour grapes.
http://www.talknerdy.org
You sir, are full of crap.
... and that's an EET that was designed to push the limits of what Evas/Edje can do. With GL acceleration that falls to 10-15%.
Let's see here...
The effects usually look professional, but they run slow and inefficiently
Evas is up to 150 times faster than XRender in plain software mode (with no hardware acceleration) at rendering images. In fact, we often prefer running in software mode than in GL mode because it's more stable and often works better. This is the wrongest statement I've ever heard in my life. Have you ever seen Engage? It does the OSX docker effect absolutely smoothly even on a relatively slow CPU and the crappiest of video cards. That complex, multi-layered animated background you see in the video runs on my system smoothly while taking less than 40% CPU
However, enlightenment is way too layered and has a million different little components... I just personally think it could all be implemented better.
So you think it would be better if we had one big monolithic, inflexible library that was full of bugs? Or you're one of those people who think that somehow the EFL is slower because it's componentized -- even though it beats the crap out of anything comparable that exists performance-wise? How does "consolidated" translate into "scalable", anyway, Mr. professor of software engineering?
This technology is there, it has been carefully thought out, solidly and cleanly implemented. Go take a look at the code/API yourself before you begin to comment. It is usable NOW, and you don't need to wait until E17 is released before you can use it. None of those things you see in the videos are simulated, that is presently working software available to anyone who wants to install it.
Am I a hipster-doofus?