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X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions
An anonymous reader writes "In a curious contrast to conventional wisdom, there are reports of X11 Chromium being faster than Windows or Mac versions. In the thread titled 'Why is Linux Chrome so fast?,' a developer speculates that it is due to the use of X11 capabilities: 'On X-windows [sic], the renderer backingstores are managed by the X server, and the transport DIBs are also managed by the X server. So, we avoid a lot of memcpy costs incurred on Windows due to keeping the backingstores in main memory there.' Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
"Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
Yes of course it has. X11 is great and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't understand it properly, or have an accurate idea of what it's genuine problems are actually due to.
Does anybody know if it's possible to compile a version of Chromium for X11 Mac?
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
HTTP/1.1 400
Uh. Maybe you don't understand what I am saying....
I KNOW that MacOS 10 is OS X.
I'm asking if anybody has compiled a version of Chromium to use X11 instead of using Cocoa.
I like how you took a bunch of graphics and video related words and threw them together in a post that sounds coherent, yet is totally wrong.
From the later discussion on that topic, it seems the conclusion was that windows had a large history in the profile and may be bitblt'ing the first draw operation from main memory. Both of which have an impact on how slow it feels to the user.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
After doing a fresh install on both systems the guy determined that it was just some sort of freak occurrence. He had one laptop with a 2.0ghz processor and another with a 2.4ghz processor and after the reinstall on both systems, VOILA...it was only roughly a 20% difference...
TFA - just keep reading further and further down the usenet post
Framebuffer is an unaccelerated bitmap display, X11 is an accelerated graphics layer (that can use a framebuffer)
something that writes directly to a framebuffer is going to need a lot of additional programming in order to be as fast as X11 is.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
We could also just move process creation to a background thread.
Ok, that's just making the process and subsequent address space.
An unused process might just get swapped out and be no cheaper to "make live" than it would be to create a new process.
It sounds like process just being put into a pool - the process creation thread is holding onto the handle - and when someone wants a new process, the thread just hands over that one presumably the heap and stack for that process would be cleared.
I don't see where there could be a security issues - but, then again, it's been 15 years since I worked on an OS, let alone an Intel based one; I have only 1 cup of coffee in me; I'm still drudging through the posts in the "article".
So in other words, those who programmed on X when X was the only big player are now older where you lose hair and sexual virility.
Colour me surprised.
Meanwhile X is still working better than Mac or Windows as a GUI framework.
Thing I don't get is why so many guys have a hard-on for dissing X.
Why?
This doesn't say it's optimized for Linux - it says that it runs well on *X11*. X11 is used on almost all Unix derivatives, not just Linux. Most importantly though, all indications are that while Google intends to use Linux (the kernel) for ChromeOS, they have made some statements that would indicate that they likely will not use X11.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If you choose your abstraction carefully, you can hide expensive details from user space.
In the short term it may not gain you anything.
But if the abstraction lives and thrives, then much can go on behind the scenes to improve the situation.
Java is another example of this: they carefully designed the language so that it would be possible to make vast simplifiying assumptions and implement optimizations that really improve performance without impacting the "other side" of the wall. Originally java was slow, but hard work behind the scenes means that your java programs run much faster now, without any extra effort on the part of the application developer.
X Windows is a great example of this. Originally we had dumb frame buffers with no acceleration at all. And yet X provides an abstraction that allows lots and lots of hardware optimizations to take place.
The Windows and OSX abstractions for the display don't provide an API that allows these sorts of optimizations to be done behind the scenes. We have incredible display hardware with awesome features that go unused in these environments because the display abstractions do not allow for them.
But the 4.X beta runs incredibly fast on my dual core Windows workstation. If the Linux version is significantly faster in rendering, I would be very surprised.
I'm pretty sure that the biggest slowdown for Chrome isn't the memcpy/bitblitting for the display - it's probably something to do with the insanely big history files it generates as part of it's searchable history.
Files you can't limit in size, can't compress, can't optimise. Instead all you can do is to delete them and loose all your precious history information.
It also has the bonus of providing a searchable address bar that performs significantly worse than firefox's searchable address bar !
I use both firefox and chrome simultaneously at home and at work, dedicated each browser for different tasks I do. It's a real shame that Chrome is being seriously degraded over time by this fault - I've started switching back to firefox because of it as my laptop just struggles too much with it now...
Yeah, at least the first one was succinct.
If you can take risk of re-compiling every X related app/library in case you give up in future, try the semi official/unofficial at http://xquartz.macosforge.org/ , it is newer than the Apple bundles. Install anything with the help of Fink/Macports like Konqueror from KDE 3 and see the amazing GUI speed, scroll speed, widget drawing speed.
I don't understand, as an OS X user, why a modern x.org on a good, supported hardware should be surprising to give better results. Also remember the insane things x.org has to do on OS X like using Aqua layer.
X11 is not bloated nor slow, GTK is both. Put 100 or so spinedits on one form in Win32 and in GTK. On netbook or anything other than quadcore machine, you will see significant difference in speed. And it is not because of the graphics. Sometimes I think GTK render fractals somewhere just to keep processor busy. Meanwhile, when I draw 100 spinedits using only cairo, it is almost as fast as Win32 while giving the same output as GTK including shadows, gradients, etc... I've being noticing this GTK behavior since forever.
GTK folks, please fix it.
How about a Qt build of Chromium as opposed to a GTK build of Chromium? I'd be real curious to see how it performs.
I was also saddened to see the port team bitch and complain initially that they had to use GTK, because GTK is "the standard toolkit" for Linux, while in the same paragraph complaining that Linux doesn't simply have one standard toolkit. Last time I checked, Windows has a bevy of toolkits and APIs to choose from as well. They also complained that writing audio in Linux was difficult.
If they had written a Qt app from day one, porting would be minimal, they wouldn't have to maintain this huge separate trunks, it would have worked from day 1 on Solaris, Mac, Linux, Windows, BSD, etc. Audio would have been very easy to code with Phonon.
I'm curious to see if Chrome (the browser and OS) are indeed both developed with GTK, then will they both need some retrofits when GTK 3.0 ships, further complicating the matter?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's been called X-Windows for a long time. Longer than the term "X11" has been around. It's not a misuse of Microsoft's Windows® brand name.
The font rendering settings are locked in. There are some Google Groups discussions about why this is so, but it was all white noise -- every other application can use .fonts.conf (even if it is a workaround to do so) and Chrome can't/won't for a while, so it got promptly uninstalled.
I'm wary of any real old legacy code.
I also know that graphic displays and inputs are vastly different today than they were 10 and 20 years ago.
Do I know that X11 is inefficient? No, but I sure read plenty of other people making those claims. However, I suspect that X11 wasn't developed initially with today's needs in mind. I do know that the X team keeps promising features, cutting them, and then still shipping six months past their projected release dates.
Novell has guys working on Mono, Evolution, OOo, KDE, Gnome, the kernel, etc. What I don't see a whole lot of is major distro companies (Red Hat, Novell, Canonical) paying for major upstream development with X. Maybe it just needs a little more love, some deprecation of old cruft, and a new forward-thinking design. There seems to be somewhat of a future direction (GEM, DRI2, MPX), but perhaps X needs a revolution.
Is Wayland a step in the right direction?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Give the guy a break. He's only trying to create synergy among web-enabled paradigms.
I read TFA and all there is are feelings of some people that its faster, no numbers. I guess that is what "reportedly" means. Weasel words.
I had the same problem with Google Desktop. It was a great tool and worked well for a while, but eventually its little database file was immense and was dragging my system down with it.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
"I also know that graphic displays and inputs are vastly different today than they were 10 and 20 years ago."
Really what is so different other than the number of pixels on the display?
"I suspect that X11 wasn't developed initially with today's needs in mind."
Then perhaps you should read about the original goals of the X window system.
Funny, but the real answer is GDI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Device_Interface
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I guess maybe I'm making bad assumptions, as I don't really know what Chrome's intent with multiple processes is... but I think the answer to your question is no, it wouldn't necessarily impact security and certainly wouldn't fully negate the multi-process approach's advantages.
The major advantage to keeping separate tasks in separate processes, it seems to me, is that they have separate memory spaces. I can't sneakily inject code into another task's buffers if I'm not in the same process. In particular, if the browser spawns a process to execute some plug-in or whatever, there's less risk that the plug-in or whatever can trick the browser into executing malicious code. (Or cause it to crash, but that's more "stability" than "security".)
In other words, the biggest security risk comes from two processes sharing the same process at the same time. I don't think re-use is as big a problem. Sure, if you did a bad job of wiping buffers, then in theory one process could see its predicessor's data; and I guess there are scenarios where that could be an issue, though I'm a little skeptical that a malicious process would go rooting around its uninitialized space "just in case" it was handed a process with something it would recognize as sensitive data from a previous task...
No - ChromeOS is looking to be an actual honest to goodness OS built around the Linux kernel with a Google-developed graphics subsystem. They are mainly targetting it towards running their own web applications rather than bundling apps with it as is the case with most other OS's, so the only INCLUDED app might be Chromium, but all indications are that developers will be able to write/port other applications to the system if they desired.
Personally I'm interested in seeing it. It's just an opinion, but most Linux distributions just have far too much legacy code and ways of doing things stacked on top of each other these days. I want an open source OS, but I think we kinda need to toss out a lot of what we currently use and start anew. Unfortunately it's not easy to do that without commercial backing, but Google pushing such an effort would really help things along.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
With all due respect, it sounds like you want to blame everything negative about Chrome on one feature you don't like. Just sayin', the developers might have a reason to think that the rendering speed has something to do with the windowing system - they're a lot less likely to be just guessing and calling their guess "pretty sure".
But for the sake of argument - if the history files are the big slow-down for Chrome, why is that slowdown less pronounced on the X11 version?
"For whatever reason, Linux drivers have NEVER taken advantage of this, and that is why Linux often looks clunky compared to Windows on the same hardware."
This is just BLATANTLY WRONG.
All you need to do is read the feature announcements for the nVidia and ATI display drivers, which you apparently DON'T DO.
nVidia's REAL target market is the folks who work at animation companies, and the hard-core data visualization people. Their products are designed to fly in THIS environment. This market is VERY HEAVILY tilted toward Unix. That is WHY you can get such EXCELLENT display support under Linux. The rest of us are just piggybacking off of this.
Quote: 500+ tabs open simultaneously
You are shitting us? How the hell can you get anything done with 500+ tabs open simultaneously? I don't think its memory leaks thats your problem. I think its the sound of the entire OS deciding enough is enough and its going to take a break.
X has it's problems. It also has it's advantages. Some of those
advantages aren't so much a matter of X itself but side effects
of the old school Unix way of approaching a problem.
Seeing MacOS going through vnc side by side with X apps being
run remotely (and viewed locally) certainly gives me no
burning desire to get rid of X.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Really? I thought he was trying to leverage the cloud architecture to optimize his software services enterprise based on open standards.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
No.
Explorer is a cross between your shell and your window manager, its like the Gnome or KDE window managers except most of the window manager functions are the responsibility of process itself in Windows, although they are provided by the standard libraries, which us things like the uxtheme.dll and company to provide a consistent interface until the app goes well out of its way to do otherwise. You can use cmd.exe in place of explorer and apps won't notice the difference unless they interact with explorer, such as things that put items in the notification area (systray to most). Apps do not talk to explorer to display windows any more than apps on Linux talk to Gnome or KDE, or Finder on OS X. None of them have to be installed or work in order for Windows to be displayed. You can kill all explorer.exe processes in windows and you just won't have a start menu or clickable desktop until it restarts. You can not kill the X11 client and do the same, all processes using it will be disconnected and exit or crash.
Quartz is a toolkit/API used within the 'window_server', like DirectX to some extent on Windows. It is not the generic low level API like GDI is on Windows.
'window_server' would be almost the direct equivalent of X11 on OS X in native applications, if you exclude X11 for OS X, which acts as a translator basically between X11 servers (applications) and your X11 client (the gui you see) and passes that along to the window_server process to display.
In reality, all three of these systems use a different mix of the way these components interact and at which layer things are done due to their different designs. There isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between any of the components.
I do not recall which process on Windows handles the GUI, but it is more or less untouchable, unlike in OS X and traditional UNIX where you can easily kill the gui portion, doing so in Windows traditionally would result in a blue screen, this is no longer strictly true in the Windows 6.x versions (Win2k8/Vista/Win7), but I don't recall what process owns that part of the system off the top of my head.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
MS Windows = Explorer.exe
Linux = X11
MacOS = Quartz
That this is marked up as informative really shows how bad slashdot has become. You losers are even shitty at being computer nerds.
It certainly works much faster than Firefox on Linux in most circumstances. One thing I have noticed, though, is that Flash applications seem to run much more slowly in Chrome than in Firefox (to the point where Chrome becomes unusable on my computer for some sites that run acceptably in Firefox.) That seems a little weird to me, since it's the same plugin. Hopefully it's a problem that will be corrected before the official Linux release.
That and the lack of a decent ad blocker are the main things that keep me from switching from Firefox. I really like the speed and the interface is generally a big step forward, but I don't really like having to switch between two browsers.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Let's just say you're wrong and I've seen flickering on plenty of Mac OS desktops.
And with X11, the flickering you get is more likely due to the program ignoring X backing store and "doing their own thang". Well guess: their failure isn't the fault of X11, is it.
"To be fair to X, managing compositing et al isn't it's job---but it should be!"
Compiz: It IS!!!
Sheesh.
And Enlightenment had compositing freaking YEARS ago.
" Between X's by-design paucity of features"
You mean like C's "paucity of features" that means libraries that do whatever you damn well want?
There is no "by-design paucity": by design X11 is extensible. See X extensions.
"Had X been designed a little more smartly (eg, for actual people and not for computer scientists) this probably wouldn't be such a problem."
Uh, what design WOULD have been for "actual people"? This statement, bald as it is, makes no sense.
X11 is designed for the task it has to solve: drawing a GUI.
One program: one purpose. Expose capability and don't impose process: someone may think of a use you never considered when writing it, so don' t write a program that will hate them for it.
The UNIX way.
Which, oddly enough, Apple have embraced to a large extent since bringing out Ten.
"By comparison, again, we have MacOS X's system, which again just works, even if in theoretical terms it's a little slower."
Two problems: the dissing of X is how slow it is. So Ten's system being slower should be more dissed, yes?
Secondly, ten's system doesn't just works else there would be no problem with "But Mac can't support clones, they have to have a limited selected hardware to deliver the eXPerience!". Ignoring that this just works meme is wrong. I've seen it often just stop a lot.
"The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X "
And here we see where you've been misled.
The UNIX paradigm is extensibility. Policy is set by the use of the program. not by its programming. And the UNIX haters hate UNIX so hate the UNIX paradigm. Ergo they hate X too.
Maybe they're just a little bit predisposed to a priori conclusions...
And it's not the "why does X drive people nuts" it's why do people get a stiffy when the opportunity comes to diss X?
(oh, and a quick look at that, hmm, *discourse* seems to be a person who gets a real big boner over getting to rant and rave about how X is teh devil. Could he be any less coherent?)
I've noticed that X unfortunately gets a lot of metaphorical rotten vegetables thrown at it from Linux users; even people who apparently are fans of Linux in every other respect.
In my own opinion, however, X qualifies as one of the greatest pieces of software ever written. Put it in perspective, here; the system has been in continual use and evolution since 1984. That's 25 years this year. Granted, its' configuration process in particular has needed radical reform, and fortunately it has recently got it.
I don't understand why people criticise its' stability, either; for me it has always been rock solid, particularly on FreeBSD.
I'm also not really surprised that Chrome might run faster under X than under Windows or the Mac. If there's one thing that's always been true of UNIX in general, it's that the system doesn't include unnecessary frills. When you're wanting to be optimised for speed in particular, that can only be a good thing.
I love X.
The only terminology I have ever heard of calls the X server "server" and applications using it "clients". Perhaps you are referring to the fact that the X server typically executes on the client computer (the user's computer), because that's where the keyboard and screen is, while the application (client) sometimes executes on a server computer, to which the user might have connected using a remote shell (such as SSH).
- As to overwriting. This occurs because the update events follow behind the UI. The problem is resolved by the composite extension, or by enabling backing store -OR- by increasing network bandwidth. Some old X Servers didn't have backing store (and certainly no compositing), AND ran over constrained pipes. It hasn't been a problem with desktop X for years.
- X is extensible by design. Multiple display support, accelerated 3D, video playback and compositing do work. For $DEITY sake, I use these features on my stinky little Acer Aspire One using Linpus! No particular problems -- "it just works" (tm). I don't like transparent windows, so I just don't bother, but it does work. Why the hell would a user want to know about the alphabet soup? Just use a packaged OS. The alphabet soup comes about because the development of X is an open process.
- And, in comparison with the Mac, you do notice that Apple packages an X Server with OS X? When running in a heterogeneous environment, it's necessary.
- Finally, you bring up the Unix Hater's Handbook. Ok, let's break it down:
1 - xload, xterm and xclock are possibly among the LEAST used programs under modern X based systems. They weren't
even installed on my Acer when I got it.
2 - Motif isn't used anymore.
3 - Cut and Paste really isn't an issue anymore, either.
4 - ssh -Y is usually used to remote X servers - authentication isn't an issue anymore either.
5 - Gnome and KDE provide the "customization methods"; since xterm isn't used anymore (or xcalc, or xedit),
the xresources issues are also gone.
6 - imake has been deprecated for YEARS.
7 - Pretty much nobody uses raw X protocol or XLib anymore either.
8 - NeWS was "killed" because IBM and DEC didn't want a repeat of NFS - they didn't want to send SUN any more money. So, they marketroids forced the issue. I agree the superior technology didn't win, but X is still around. Sucks to be the customer when they get what they have been told to ask for.
The UGH was relevant in the early '90s. No longer.
The "MAC UI Experience" could be planted on top of X. I am disappointed that Apple isn't driving that. It would involve developing several extensions that would be useful to X users. But, if Apple doesn't want to do it, others will:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CompositeExt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRender
http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/randr/randr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_video_extension
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/801-6662/6i1196cd6?l=ja&a=view
The first four are generally implemented. The last is not (X/DPS). But, MAC OS X only implements a subset of X/DPS anyway (and, of course, it isn't compatible).
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
How much of the graphical user interface evolution on UNIX has been put back because the varying WMs and toolkits?
It's better now that we're down to X.org and GTK or Qt, but years were wasted because you couldn't write an app that took advantage of, say, Display Postscript or multi-head or decent colour-correction or a given GUI toolkit without restricting your market.
For a very long time---and ending not so long ago---state of the art, cross-platform GUI toolkits on UNIX started and ended with Motif. That's horrible.
That doesn't really speak to the question of whether the window manager should be built-in...
I mean, I don't want to sound like the situation is all roses here. Yes, as you say, there's been a lack of focus that has detracted from the overall experience. But, you gotta look at the bright side, too. Suppose Motif and/or mwm had been integrated tightly into the X server... Where would we be now? We'd still be stuck with it, probably... Would we really be happier knowing that a clear direction had been chosen, if that clear direction sucked?
I think the lack of focus is an unavoidable consequence of a system that's developed without clear-cut, authoritative leadership. That's a down-side of using a system that's not been designed by a single group like Microsoft or Apple. But the up-shot is that a system like that is open to experimental ideas. The result isn't a true meritocracy of software (that is, no matter how good a piece of software you might write for a particular task, there are still practical problems in terms of getting people to invest themselves in using it) but there are always options...
Going back to the question of tighter integration of the wm with the X server - I remain unconvinced. I could see how X could benefit from better compositing support and other features to make wm's behave better, but I don't see what the benefit would be of having the wm built right in to the X server. It seems like running it on the local machine is just as good...
Bow-ties are cool.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Us losers? Are you implying that somehow you are exempt from being a loser while still posting to slashdot just because you are anonymous?
An anonymous coward who knows what he or she is talking about is far more valuable than a poster with an account who doesn't.
The window manager should have been part of X from the get-go.
The window manager should NOT be part of X. Choice of window managers is a good thing. And what is even better is choosing and changing window managers without logging out. Or running them in different windows (really handy sometimes.)
99% of users don't do that you say? I don't care. It's nerdy goodness, and this is news for nerds.
I think it's only the persons that call the terminology reversed are the ones that are backwards. It's very logical to me.