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."

Comments

This sucks

[Punboy]

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.

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! :-p

Good

[keesh]

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.

Re:Good

[trevorcor]

A good deal of the point of XGL, once you get past the hype-machine eye-candy business, is that it means only *one* driver for every video card -- a DRI one. Eliminating the dichotomy between the 2D X drivers and the 3D DRI drivers will only improve driver support for both 2D and 3D -- the effort needed to support both will be halfed, and 3D support will be required to support 2D.

There's even been talk about porting the Linux kernel framebuffer drivers to the DRI interface (possibly in userspace, run from initramfs).

Have you ever tried to get an X server, accelerated 3D, and a framebuffer console to get along on the same machine? It's ugly.

Add in multi-monitor support, and you can't even do it. So it's not possible to have all of accelerated 3D, multiple monitors and a console on platforms like the Macintosh that don't have a text mode in hardware.

Jon Smirl was also doing work on DRI/DRM, an area of the Linux video "architecture" that's much in need of love. I'm really sad to hear that he's giving all his video work up -- I was really looking forward to the day the whole Linux video mess got cleaned up for good.

Too bad, Xegl = less CPU wasted and more eye-candy

[rarrar]

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.

Bad

[2nd Post!]

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!

Re:Xgl misguided, flawed anyway

[metamatic]

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.

I have to wonder if you've ever done any OpenGL programming. OpenGL has sub-pixel rendering, its pixel-alignment algorithms are documented, and it has support for whatever natural units you like. (In my most recent screensaver, I set it up to work in cm.) It doesn't have color matching, but then again neither does X.