Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 1st Jul 2002 17:50 UTC
David Dawes is maybe the most active XFree86 developer and he is also the lead founder of the project. He works for Tungsten Graphics, which is the main company working on the XFree, DRI and Mesa codebases today. We are happy to host an interview with David, discussing the present and future of XFree86 project. Update: Still confused how a VSYNCed desktop look like? Read here.
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I cannot agree with you there about moving things to the server, it is not the solution. They should strive at removing as much as possible from the X server.
What do you really need as a developer of a desktop environment? You need input and surfaces to draw on, nothing else.
First they should split of the network transparency part, I bet 90% of all X users are connected to a locally running X server at all times and those who are not are probably running their connection over a LAN so they could probably afford a less efficient protocol.
If they ditch the network part this would mean that all communication with the X server could run over the locally most efficient means of communication. As it is today everything runs on BSD sockets which are less then ideal when connecting to local servers on most operating systems.
Make the extreme paranoia optional. Every client should be able to get as low as level to the hardware as possible. If a client behaves badly I for one could take that extra 10s to kill of the client manually and then have the X server reset the desktop state. It's not a big deal if a client paints out of it's bounds because the data I was working with is still intact.
The biggest error in the X protocol is that is trying abstract away the actual hardware at an to early stage while not providing any tools for compensating this HUGE loss in client side flexibility with anything. This have up until now been solved by ADDING to the protocol instead of exposing more of the hardware. XRender, DRI, GLX, MIT-SHM, double buffer, XShape, XVideo. Just that X11 have all these extensions to even function remotly as a modern display system shows how much of a failed architecture it is.