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Xorg and Desktop Eyecandy
BonoLeBonobo writes "Xorg is going to include a new acceleration architecture which will help desktops to have better eye-candy effects thanks to a better XRender, thus composite, acceleration. Developped by Zack Rusin, a KDE and Qt developper, this new feature should be present in Xorg in September. Porting the existing drivers to this new acceleration architecture should be easy."
Double dandy.
Even so,
No girls handy.
Fix your face,
Reveal you're randy.
Burma Shave.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
You will be accelerated. Resistance is futile.
*looks at Microsoft, particularly Luna*
*coughs loudly*
*is beaten by hired goons*
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
This will mean more than simply being able to easily take out possibly unwanted cruft out of X packages (stuff like xcalc, xterm, etc). It will be pretty easy to put just the X server libraries and binaries on one computer and the X protocol libraries and applications that use them on another.
I'm sure you could do that now, but it would require a lot of work.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I've been looking to change the font on my command line.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
An article about Desktop Eye Candy which has no screen shots to show off said, "Eye Candy"....
Some one find some screen shots or we will have nothing to talk about.
I think its great that X is getting a universal architecture for this sort of stuff, but I'll be disapointed if Rastermann and others dont have some sort of input in this, mainly because DR17 is showing me how *fast* this sort of thing can be (faster than KDE in the case of DR17 and a 2 second boot-time on my AMD 2600+).
As for applications made using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.... wow...! Entice is absolutely amazing, totally dynamic and animated, as well as mainly transparent, perfect for an image viewer.
The point is that you don't realise how USEFUL these sort of features are. Why shouldn't menus in an image viewer fade in and out and be semi-transparent? When you use it, it makes perfect sense.
I know there will be people who consider this sort of tech a waste of resources, and it can certainly be abused. However, if it's done properly this type of environment can add a LOT to your user experience.
I suggest you try DR17 to see exactly how impressive this sort of tech can be!
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
well the core of X hasn't changed substantially in .. over a decade. While window managers and desktop environments have come a long way, the foundation, X, hasn't.
... a firefox which would take less than 160 MB of RAM, an Openoffice.org which would take less than 150 MB, an X.org which would take less than 100 MB.
And so on.
.. with hardware acceleration, the NVidia drivers will probably be the first available with the support. Meanwhile the ATI and other FLOSS drivers will implement it about 8 months later.
There are some situations in which sponsored closed software wins every time, and one of those is hardware drivers. When a new API is released, a team of paid developers that know your hardware inside and out (because they work for the company that design it) will do a better job of porting their code quickly, and will be able t o do it much faster.
I don't really care how much slashdot fanboys rant about NVidia, the people who actually use high-end video cards in Linux know the truth - NVidia is and has always been oders of magnitude above the rest.
They can keep the drivers closed till hell freezes over for all I care - they work, they work great, they have more frequent stable updates with bugfixes and new features than any FLOSS drivers I know of.
guess people have weird priorities in the linux world. adding bloat and gimmicks isnt fixing the user friendliness problems.
To hell with the eye candy, why don't they worry about making dual monitor support as easy as it currently is in M$ OS's.
I would much perfer that over more "eyecandy"
Huh? Are you saying that your wife is neither reliable nor faithful, or not eye candy? I don't get it.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Maybe because Xorg still implements the X specification/protocol, version 11, Release 6? Adding eyecandy does not add to or change this at all...
Your sig is mine
Its not just pure eye candy , Though Eye candy really does help in the home market.If they have improved the composite rendering engine i would hope that the desktop environments will take less resources. ,KDE can be a great working environment and gnome also (depends on your tastes , i can set up KDE to feel slightly more like OS X so i mainly stick with KDE)
I never understood why people find DEs like Gnome or KDE hard to use anyway or even poor , if set up properly
All you need to do is to Burma shave some of the options and your flying , KDE for me is a far better working environment than windows .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
that, as X developers said, this is only a temporary solution, so that while Xgl matures we will have hardware alpha compositing in hardware. The final solution will be pushing the entire hardware abstaction layer (OpenGL) under the Xserver, in order to take advantage of the 3D hardware on the desktop too.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
Start an X12 already. Why add all this crap to this ancient X11R--what--6? I really don't understand.
I agree. I don't understand all those idiots who have stereos with volume controls that only go up to "10"
Mine goes up to "11", for when I need that extra umph.
On a serious note, X11 remains X11 because its core hasn't changed (or needed to change) in many years. R7 will add some nice features, features some of us have been waiting a long time for, but none of those features requires a redesign of X11 (which goes to show how flexible and well designed X11 is), so there is no need to increment X11 to X12 . . . unless you really are just looking to turn the volume up to "11", or in this case, "12".
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Actually X.org uses very little memory: it was designed to run in 16MB (or was it 8MB ?).
The memory you see being taken up by the X server can be attributed to several things: a mmaped framebuffer (if you have a 256MB videocard, the reported memory usage of X will include that), and server side shared pixmaps. It is really the applications' fault if this gets out of control.
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
if it's any consolation, the new render acceleration architecture will accelerate desktops with little to no eyecandy, too.
Inconceivable!
They'll only make it X12 if and when they break that compatibility, and they won't do that without a good reason.
There's no requirement that an X12 server be completely incompatible with an X11 server. i.e. The X12 could easily accept commands from an X11 stream. While the X11 server would not be able to understand X12, such issues would be slow in cropping up, and X12 should easily be able to replace X11 long before that happens.
The extension architecture works fine AFAICS, is there an actual problem you have with it?
I can't speak for the parent poster, but my primary issue with current X-Windows is not so much the protocol (which could use a good overhaul anyway), and more the current design of X-Servers. Instead of forcing the OS to do its job, current X-Server designs schlep up video card, mouse, joystick, and other hardware control. The reasons for this design aren't entirely clear, but it is obvious that this is a source of many X-Windows issues. Moving these drivers to the OS level would improve reliability and configurability all around.
Don't take my word for it, however. Mr. Packard has a very good writeup on the issue.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The X Consortium shut down in 1996, after declaring X11R6.3. At this point, it's not clear how an accepted X12 standard could be generated, even if people wanted to do so.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This poster has a valid point.
Xorg crashes my machine on switching from X to a text VC.
This bug is well known and serious - all eye candy and other non-essentials should wait until this and other serious bugs are fixed.
Qaulity before features.
If I wanted it the other way around, I know where to buy Windows.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
X is a protocol, not a piece of software, so there is no such thing as a "distribution of X". XFree86 and X.org are both servers that implement the X protocol (version 11), but they are far from the only ones. There have been dozens of different implementations of the X protocol since it was created 20 years ago. Some of them run in a few hundred kbytes. Furthermore, the X server and the X client libraries are already pretty much independent. Traditionally, with the MIT X distribution, all you needed to run the server was the X server binary (a statically linked executable), the "fixed" font, and a bunch of configuration files. I believe under Debian, you can install one without the other if you like.
if you read the mailing list (I do) you would see that a one part of this is that it is architecture is s simpler. simpler drivers == more stable drivers
development is happening... I assure you
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
You know why Linux is destined to fall to a distant third place against Apple and MS? Crappy marketing. I clicked through every link in the post, and searched around for about 10 minutes, and couldn't find a single screenshot of the so-called "eye candy".
You want to sell users on the eye candy? HOW ABOUT A PICTURE???
Meanwhile, I know exactly what a MacOSx desktop looks like, even though I've never used a mac, and I've seen the eye-candy in Longhorn screenshots, and that OS isn't coming out for another year at the earliest.
I'd much rather see fonts that don't suck on LCD monitors than eye candy. I can do without shadows and showy effects, but not without clean, clear fonts.
I'm writing this from a machine with a 1600x1200 Dell 2001FP monitor, and an ATI Radeon 9200SE, connected with DVI running X.Org version 6.8.2. I have never, ever been able to get decent fonts with XFree86 or X.org. The fonts are either too jagged without antialiasing, or too blurry with it.
I have wasted hour after hour following various FAQs, playing with antialiasing, autohinting, and subpixel rendering in my ~/.fonts.conf. I have installed the Bitstream Vera fonts. I have sacrificed a goat and done a rain dance. And still, all those fonts look so blurry that I feel like I'm going blind.
Thinking that it was something about the Radeon, I tried an NVidia 5200 with the commercial NVidia drivers. No joy. I've also tried the ATI fglrx drivers for the Radeon. No joy.
Yet when I plug in my Apple Powerbook, OSX makes the fonts clear and legible, so it must be possible to drive the LCD monitor correctly.
Just ask Nvidia, Xorg people can do nothing to fix Nvidia drivers problems.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_me mcache
// Specify the amount of memory cache: // -1 = determine dynamically (default), 0 = none, n = memory capacity in kilobytest y", 4096);
// Disable memory cache:
This MAY help
Specify the memory cache usage
Normally, Firefox determines the memory cache usage dynamically based on the amount of available memory. To specify a specific amount of memory cache, add the following code to your user.js file:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capaci
To disable the memory cache completely, add the following code:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.enable", false);
And lose that wonderful cross platform ability and userland protection? What color is the sky on your planet?
Moving the drivers into the kernel is crazy. It might simplify the X server code, but it will be a bitch to maintain for several operating systems. Not the whole world wants or does want to run Linux. What is it with the Linux contingent of FOSS-land and dumping everything into ring 0?
Where do you get the notion that the X server takes care of all the input devices? The kernel already provides access to them through</rant>
*reads the post again*
*there is no tao on slashdot*
*I watch birds fly past*
The RenderAccel option to the nVidia driver is experimental, not RENDER itself. GTK+ has been using Render directly for several years now.
Keith makes lots of good points. He also notes that a lot of work is already being done toward fixing some of these issues, or at least cleaning them up some. Of course, you have to balance these things; he's discussing what would be ideal, when in reality the Xorg folks would like to keep some reasonable release schedule, which means not overhauling the whole thing at once. The archetecture has been moving toward kernel drivers and a unified gl-based renderer for some time, and that's good.
However, it doesn't at all add up to a change away from X11R6. Nothing Keith proposes requires a protocol change...just a reworking of Xorg's implementation of X11R6. It looks like from the second part of your post that you see that, but I'd like to make doubly-clear....the protocol is fine. And as for the servers, they may be a bit ugly, but they work for now, and they'll get there.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Tone down the frothing-at-the-mouth paranoia a bit, please. I doubt the GP poster was suggesting that the drivers run at ring 0 -- he certainly never suggested such.
/dev anyway.
/dev device hardly equates to proper support via a driver API. I'm beginning to get the impression that most Linux developers really don't see why this was a bad idea from day 1, and that's very unfortunate.
Instead he was just pointing out the pure stupidity of the fact that X Windows itself must handle drivers for video, sound, mouse, and so forth, rather than relying on services exposed by an underlying layer of the OS (which does not have to be running in ring 0). If the OS handled these devices, AS IT SHOULD, any program could make use of them without having to go through X.
Where do you get the notion that the X server takes care of all the input devices? The kernel already provides access to them through
Raw access to a
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
I found why we went to X11 -- I tried reverting to X10 and kept getting pop-up ads for voyeur cameras.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_me mcache [mozilla.org]
// Specify the amount of memory cache: // -1 = determine dynamically (default), 0 = none, n = memory capacity in kilobytest y", 4096);
// Disable memory cache:
This MAY help
Specify the memory cache usage
Normally, Firefox determines the memory cache usage dynamically based on the amount of available memory. To specify a specific amount of memory cache, add the following code to your user.js file:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capaci
To disable the memory cache completely, add the following code:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.enable", false);
--
The GPL isn't the only definition of Freedom or Free.
What the grandparent was suggesting wasn't moving all of the X server code into the kernel. I suggest you enable something like the Secure Access Key in Linux and kill X and see how well you go at getting your video back in a usable state. I have also managed to put the video into an unknown state by simply switching to a text virtual console while X is starting up.
I don't believe X should be responsible for restoring the video context other than its own.
/Me offers CoolVibe a glass of ice water
/dev anyway.
:-)
Ok, slow down there buckaroo. Let's go through these points one at a time.
And lose that wonderful cross platform ability and userland protection?
X-Windows' cross platform abilities are inhibited by keeping driver code in the X-Server. Having OS specific code only leads to various build trees for each system, some incompatible. As for userland protection, no one is suggesting that X-Windows itself be moved into the kernel. Just the drivers which run in Ring 0 anyway.
Moving the drivers into the kernel is crazy. It might simplify the X server code, but it will be a bitch to maintain for several operating systems.
Nonsense. It's the Operating System's responsibilty to provide driver services. Shunning those services in favor of a hodgepodge of semi-userland drivers is silly. The X Server should float on top of the Operating System's graphical services, not cram a new driver model down its throat.
Not the whole world wants or does want to run Linux.
Preaching to the choir there. But that still doesn't mean that the X-Server shouldn't do its job correctly. It's not supposed to be a hardware manager, that's the OS's responsibility.
The kernel already provides access to them through
Not quite. Up until recently, the OS only provided raw access to the ports. X was responsible for managing these devices. As time went on (and BSD in particlar pushed back), X was modified to work with system mappings of devices. Unfortunately, X still demands direct control and can often screw up if it doesn't get it, or doesn't understand the device correctly.
Sure, the GFX side uses blitting directly to video ram, but that's what the others do as well. mmap(), memcpy and friends work fast enough from userland anyway.
The GFX side does not blit directly to RAM. X commands are queued up and shunted to the driver as appropriate. This may translate to blits, or it may translate to accelerated graphics commands. There's a major push at the moment to change all X operations over to OpenGL. If this were done, then the X-server would never need to see another blit again. It would simply pass a set of command primitives to the driver, and the video card would do all the work. Quite fast, quite easy, and quite correct.
And don't start about X using sockets to talk to clients, because they have nothing to do with networking
There is nothing wrong with X's networking. That's what it's designed to do. My point only addresses the matter of hardware control which X should not be in the business of. Look at a Sun machine, for example. The card is always in graphics mode, and those modes can be determined on the command line. All the X-Server does is take over the screen and begin drawing. It really doesn't care about the underlying hardware, as it should be.
I understand that you're upset about the old "X is slow" arguments and the like. Unfortunately, you're barking up the wrong tree here. My argument has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with architecture. Should the OS be given back control of the hardware, then it would again be possible to do things like run multiple X-Servers, run video games without X interfering, using graphics mode for the terminal, and other fun and interesting things. All because X would be a client of the OS, not a peer.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
s/Linux/Gentoo/
Of course, you were just trolling.
This is going worst as Deer Park won't accept GTK without XFT. It's too slow, too ugly, too illisible and ... http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1510 011 ... people in forums have just bogus responses like "upgrade upgrade upgrade". They don't want to understand that anti-aliased fonts are completely bogus in normal sizes. Raster fonts are better at "small" sizes, they matches exactly what it should look at, how the artist think it.
When I look at vector fonts with or without AA, I just believe that my mobile phone has BETTER LISIBILITY that my pc... it's... irrationnal !
If Qt/GTK could have an option "prefer raster that vector", I will be soooooooooo happy.
This is also impacting speed and comfort.
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
Then, in KDE, I went to Control Center -> Appearance & Themes -> Fonts -> Use antialising: true, then Configure -> Use sub-pixel hinting: as appropriate and Hinting style: medium. Voila! Beautiful subpixel antialiased fonts on my Linux and FreeBSD, each with different LCD monitor models.
I'm not even sure if I actually needed to edit local.conf, but it's been ages since I set it up and I don't remember the exact reasons for it.
In other words, it sounds like you have problems with the way your desktop of choice is configured for AA fonts. Understand that other desktops handle the job quite gracefully and with good results.
I am a
Will this new architecture be extensible enough that the primitive drawing routines can be implemented as fragment programs (like Quartz 2D Extreme)? There was a huge speedup for those that enabled it on OS X and I'm sure X11 could reap the same benefits. It makes a lot of sense to offload drawing and compositing to the GPU, but I couldn't find any reference to it in the article.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
My reaction to this was "Huh?" so I went and looked it up. Apparently, WikiPedia is a...
"porting", "drivers", "new architecture", "easy"...
[blows pitchpipe, clears throat]
One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong...
Thank you, thank you - I love you all!
Chances are, the folks that are implementing this eye candy and not the ones that could / want to fix bugs - this stuff is pretty parallel, so I don't think these people working on acceleration will prevent others from fixing bugs. -Neil
I'd note that in my experience, the Nvidia driver's RenderAccel option is OK on generations NV2x and later (GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce FX, Quadro FX, etc) but dodgy and prone to causing crashes on NV1x (GeForce4 MX, some Quadro NVS such as the ones in all the recent cheapo Dell workstations my company has bought us, grr). In fact, I believe it's documented that running KDE 3.4 with an NV1x GPU with RenderAccel enabled will cause an instant X server crash. Check your GPUs...
No you didn't. You said that you tried a few things but completely left out how you tried to go about them. Maybe your attempts were misguided and you missed the obvious solution? If the grandparent used the same method to configure two different operating systems on two different pieces of hardware, maybe he's on to something that you're overlooking.
Just because you're less bad than 19/20 of entrants in a particular contest not related to the subject at hand doesn't mean that you're an expert on this topic.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Categorically: no. Fonts on your system suck. On my system, they look as good as they do on the nearby PCs and Macs. Whether because of
your situation is not universal. I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, but I can't stand people claiming that "Linux can't do $bar" when I personally use it to do $bar every day. Certain may have problems with $bar on their setup, but that doesn't mean that no one else can manage it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
> Moving the drivers into the kernel is crazy.
It's a fact that graphics cards for many years have required interrupts and DMA to be programmed well, and that is just not something you can do from userspace. Several other things that X does today are at least dubious to do in userspace.
A good graphics driver these days need some sort of help from the kernel, but moving the *entire* driver into ring 0 is indeed a bad idea. The things that can safely and sanely be done from userspace should be.
Moving the drivers into the kernel is crazy. It might simplify the X server code, but it will be a bitch to maintain for several operating systems.
Uh, the purpose of an OS is to provide hardware abstraction.
Why do we have filesystem code in the OS? Why not just do that in X11 that way we don't need filesystems in both BSD and linux?
For that matter, why put the video drivers in X11? Why not just put them in individual applications. After all, it is waste to have an nvidia driver for windows and MacOS and X11. Why not just have one for photoshop and let it just manage its own screen?
The OS is the right layer for a device driver. There is no reason that driver has to run ring 0 - granted this is harder to accomplish with linux.
Admittedly, this would be a painful transition, but there is no reason that it has to happen in six months. It just wouldn't hurt to admit that putting device drivers in an application is a mistake. X11 is just an application.
I don't know about anyone else, but my biggest gripe with X performance these days is the rendering speed of RGB subpixel anti-aliasing. (at least on Radeon cards, which is all I have..) It's not unusably slow, but it's highly noticable and makes everything feel sluggish.. especially scrolling.
Curious? Do a quick test:
x11perf -aa10text
x11perf -rgb10text
On my system, running X.org 6.8.1, regular AA text is about 8x faster than RGB-AA. RGB-AA produces no slow-down in Windows on machines I've checked, so it must be a driver or implementation issue.