Slashdot Mirror
Xgl Developer Calls it Quits
nosoupforyou writes "Jon Smirl, one of two main developers for Xgl and Xegl (a version of X layered on top of OpenGL and rendering directly to the linux framebuffer, similar to Apple's Quartz Extreme) is calling it quits. Citing two years of effort without pay, a shortage of interest from developers, and no hope of release for more than a year, Jon is moving on."
Xgl has been heavily backed by Novell/RedHat and the gnome fanboys (well, by 'backed' I mean hyped as if this was going to save gnome's arse), but the real work in X is being payed for by that favorite FOSS company that gives so much, but everyone loves to hate: Trolltech.
Here you have it folks. It is now time for the gnome fanboys to jump off of the Xgl bandwagon. And thank Trolltech for coming up with exa that will allow composite to work with todays existing stuff. Of course, with Trolltech employing the developers you can guess which desktop is going to have the advantage of bringing all the new eye candy to market...
considering the dearth of posts on slashdot i'd say no one cares that he quit.
I was really looking forward to the completion of this project. This is what we all need to accomplish the goal of bringing Linux to the desktop. We need to be able to make a, what we're calling at Plasma, a "designer desktop" that everyone will love and enjoy.
:-p
I'm surprised that Trolltech hasn't looked into and started contributing to this. They recently hired someone specifically to work on the enhancement of X and bringing its eye-candy and performance capabilities up to the point where it can compete with things like MacOS X without slowing down horrible.
Trolltech, save us!
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Hopefully now more effort will be made towards core functionality and better drivers rather than wasting time on annoying eye candy CPU drain. Mod me troll if you will, but I for one would rather have time devoted to proper usable drivers for modern graphics cards than some silly extras that eat all my CPU and RAM but contribute nothing towards functionality or productivity.
Forgive my appeal to authority but,
Nat Friedman: "Xgl opens up a whole world of hardware acceleration, fancy animations, separating hardware resolution from software resolution, and more"
To those moaning about the lack of better video drivers, From wikipedia: "Structuring all rendering on top of Opengl should simplify modern video driver development and not have the separation of 2D and 3D acceleration." That means vendors would have an easier time giving you your "better drivers".
And of course OS X and Longhorn have already gone this route, placing FOSS behind the times.
And finally, you can have both improved current X and Xegl. Witness the recent Exa buzz (replacement X acceleration architecture); current X is getting a boost already, Xegl doesn't slow this in any way, however Exa is slowing Xegl apparently.
i find it a shame that these projects, which seem to be the only things that could save us from x11 (along with its 16-bit code), are going downhill from negligence.
its all complicated code that's hard to contribute too, mixed with slow progress that will lose fans. ive been looking at y-windows ever since it appeared on slashdot a couple years ago, but its seemed to have died down almost to the point of giving up.
it'd be nice if groups like Trolltech or Red-hat could fund these groups, to help one of the more important aspects of the open source desktop that is sublimely promised within the next decade.
"it'd be nice if groups like Trolltech or Red-hat could fund these groups, to help one of the more important aspects of the open source desktop that is sublimely promised within the next decade."
Doing that would be like Bill Gates accepting Linux.
A condemnation of the GPL-OSS "business? we don't need no stinkin business." model
You don't know anything do you?
1) Modern video cards are 3d accelerated
2) 3d is a generic superset of 2d
3) GPUs are nearly more powerful (if not clearly) than CPUs
4) More graphics == more information
5) More information == more productivity
Assertion: 3d accelerated UIs reduce CPU usage (because more/all user feedback is handled by the GPU instead of the CPU, point 1, 2, 3, and 4), and provide improved usability (points 4 and 5).
The loss of this effort also has negative consequences: Driver development is stalled between 2d and 3d (points 1 and 2), rather than just developing one set of drivers, and UI improvements are stalled (because loss of point 3 limits, to the CPU, improvements in points 4 and 5).
Here are examples of how 3d acceleration can be used to "increase" productivity:
Using 3d hardware to render fonts at high resolution and fidelity to the screen. Improved rendering reduces eyestrain by increasing readability. If it is easier to distinguish between an 'l', 'i', '1', and '|', that's an easier time during coding. The same for 'O' and '0', and 'g', '9', and other similar characters. Higher resolutions require more rendering horsepower, and assigning it to the GPU means less drain on the CPU.
Higher resolution displays will in general have more information; more information translates to higher graphical load, such as number of windows, number of characters, number of graphic elements, and the numerous interactions between all of them. If you can use z buffers and stencil buffers to manage all of these elements, that removes the load on the CPU to manage window, character, and graphic redraw. If you use shaders and vertex transforms to handle font rendering and drawing, you get improved fonts and displays without eating up CPU time. If you use blending modes and texturing hardware to handle window drawing, that's less CPU drain when determining what gets updated, how it gets updated, and when it gets updated.
Then there are the SFX that can only be done with GPUs (rather than wasting CPU power). Window scaling and window transformation, rather than relying on the CPU to handle window resizing, zooming and minimizing, and window movement.
Instead, you'd rather waste CPU cycles on all of those effects!
GPL Deconstructed
I know how it feels to have people neglect your work... But it's a pity that he's throwing in the towel at this point.
Cairo, the main consumer of Xgl/Xegl, is just nearing version 1.0, and will be used by the new releases of Gtk/Gnome. Also, once Gecko 1.8 is out the door the plan is to move the entire Gecko GFX architecture to Cairo. It already uses it for SVG rendering. So some of the big boys are coming to the party!
Hopefully things will pick up and he'll return to it soon...
Regards,
-Jeremy
"If you havent noticed, open source software doesnt exist just to give you what you want."
200[1..2..3..4..5..] is the year of Linux.
Apparently no one else will be getting anything either.
Part of the problem is resources. There just isn't enough being spent by graphics folks on, well, graphics. SGI had some amazing graphics. Once. OpenGL was revolutionary. Once. Then they kinda lost their way and are now on the verge of extinction - ironically, just as they're beginning to revolutionize supercomputer Linux with their Altix cluster.
Of course, it doesn't help that many brand-name graphics chip designers have Top Secret APIs for their products. Yeesh! From theater to Ford Motor Cars, plenty have realized that what matters is bums on seats. If you have the numbers, you'll win. IBM nearly killed itself trying to prove otherwise, as did Transmeta. Bought an ICL computer lately?
As far as GUI interfaces goes, the same logic applies. What matters is the number of users. From that perspective, it would seem logical for chip manufacturers to build the whole of the client-side of the GUI into the chips. Whoever gets there first will rule the GUI market for some considerable time and competitor hardware GUIs will have a harder time of it.
Won't happen, for the same reason Winmodems became popular. It's cheaper to let Microsoft define the standards and build around what Microsoft won't provide. At which point, writing competing GUIs is pointless, as the only efficient GUI will be one that is identical to Microsoft's.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That isn't an appeal to authority, I'm sure we could find Nat Friedman saying something equally inane about the mono bogosity.
If you're going to quote someone, at least quote someone credible.
2D is NOT 3D. Good 2D displays need subpixel rendering, predictable pixel-alignment ability yet support for natural units taking the DPI of the display into account, color correction, etc. OpenGL is simply inadequate as a high-end 2D API. You'd need to extended with a whole load of extra API functions to be useful for professional 2D work.
The new reworked 2D X acceleration architecture is the right approach, which will allow graphics card driver coders to more easily use the GPU hardware of the graphics card to accelerate 2D APIs (this is NOT THE SAME THING AT ALL as using OpenGL for 2D!) - and if you want whizzy 3D effects, you can still use and intermingle OpenGL GLX requests and 2D X11 requests IF YOU WANT TO onto the same canvas.
Now, what WOULD be useful would be hardware-accelerated indirect GLX rendering (so that remote X11+OpenGL apps were hardware accelerated). All modern cards are architecturally capable of this - it just needs work in the X server.
For me, and lots of other people and companies, every year is a new year of GNU/Linux. It's already there, and has been there for a while. :)
Thai restaurant guy: You quitter. Quitter boy! Quitter boy!
Now restaurant fail. Children go to state college. Serious students powerless against drunken jock-ocracy.
Baseball hats everywhere!
Why is everybody bemoaning the demise of Xgl?
The main point, to me, is the reason nobody's interested any more: X11 is getting better and, with recent extensions such as EXA and all that composite stuff, has caught up in terms of eyecandiness. The niche for the project no longer exists as Xorg-X11 proper is starting to fill it. And that's a good thing.
Something to think about.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It doesn't have color matching, but then again it should be easy to add if drivers supported the GL_ARB_Imaging extension properly.
As a simple example of scaling r,g,b you can use something like..
float color_croma = { dr,0,0,0,
0,dg,0,0,
0,0,db,0,
0,0,0,1 };
glMatrixMode(GL_COLOR);
glLoadMatrixf(color_croma);
and with a 4^2 matrix it's also easy to adjust things like the hew and saturation and anything else you'd need for colour matching.
Judging by the replies in the actual thread he posted on, and the low number of /. replies...who cares?
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
OS X, yes. Longhorn? Not --- it's not a shipping product any more than Xgl is, and even the much bemoaned "1 year from release" still puts Xgl at a release around the time of longhorn.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...