Linked by Rayiner Hashem & Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 24th Nov 2003 16:24 UTC
Today we are very happy to publish a very interesting Q&A with major freedesktop.org members: the founder Havoc Pennington (also of Debian, Gnome and Red Hat fame), Waldo Bastian (of SuSE & KDE fame), Keith Packard and Jim Gettys (of X/XFree86/fontconfig/w3c fame) and David Zeuthen, a new member who's taking over the ambitious HAL project. In the article, we discuss about general freedesktop.org goals, status and issues, the role of KDE/Qt in the road to interoperability with Gnome/GTK+, HAL (with new screenshots), the new X Server aiming to replace XFree86 and we even have an exclusive preliminary screenshot of a version of Mac OS X's Exposé window management feature for this new X Server! This is one article not to be missed if you are into Unix/Linux desktop!
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Great article.
About the XServer/XFree86/Kdrive confusion:
Kdrive was initially a heavily modified version of XFree86 to allow it to run on low-memory devices such as handhelds. It uses as little memory as possible by performing a lot of calculations at runtime instead of storing it in memory. Due to the high load latencies (relative to clock speed) of modern hardware, this actually becomes a speed optimization in some cases. It has less code duplication with the kernel (although there's still work to do in that area, but it needs sync with the kernel guys). The internals are also cleaned up and it's supposed to be easier to work with and modify.
For these reasons, Keith Packard chose to base his new efforts on Kdrive rather than just copying the source tree from XFree86.org. At some point it was renamed to Xserver (not XWin, that is a just a website as the title at xwin.org says. And it looks pretty dead now, but fd.o is hosted there).
Xserver doesn't support everything XFree86 does. Most of these features are useless anyway (like PIE, Ximage and a bunch of other obsolete stuff). The driver modules are gone too (Xserver is more like Xfree86 3.x with separate servers for each card). That's not too bad since the graphics driver infrastructure in linux is in great need of an overhaul anyway.
X bloatedness was overrated to begin with, but with the new Xserver + the new X C bindings things will get even leaner.
Another nice fact is that the "unsnappines" of X is being solved, on two different fronts using two different approaches and we will end up with the benefits of both.
As XDirectFB shows, reducing the number of expose events significantly improves the feel of the desktop. Xserver will have that, and combined with the kernel CPU scheduling efforts by Andrew Morton, Nick Piggin, Con Calivas and others things will get supersnappy and ultrafast. Like running TWM on a supercomputer.
Am i the only one that thinks that Keith Packard looks like Steve Ballmer (minus the sweaty armpits and the monkey dance) ??