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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Sorry anonymous, but things are both better and worse than you think. The requirements for a desktop environment are considerably more than just input and drawing. The main one being coordination - provided in X via the definition of a root window and properties support. We also need support for overlays (such as TV), efficient event dispatch (as provided by X11s Window structure) and this just touches the surface.
Fortunately the XFree86 implementation is less brain-dead than you suggest and can use shared memory to speed things up if the client and server are on the same machine. This still leaves a cost in terms of the serialisation of all the data into a neutral format (X11) but it doesn't involve a trip through the OS network stack.
Personally I would like to see quite a lot changes to X11:
- Stored server side vector shapes (XRender looks to be solving this one)
- Removal of cruft from XLib
- Window transparency in hardware
- Improvements to the XVideo API that make it work properly. (eg. you can't find out the strength of the
signal from a TV tuner at the moment so you can't use it
to scan for channels).
- The possibility of some way to upload code to the server (possibly non-turing complete) in order to reduce
the number of round trips for things like mouse-over effects.
- And as the original article said, I want easier configuration.
Rich.