http://www.osnews.com/story/1905/Making_the_Case_for_XFree86_s_Speed Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:43:05 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? XFree86 needs to be faster,easier,smaller and better looking.

what needs to happen is a Fork in development. 1 going purely desktop and 1 Keeping Client/Server socket crap.

I think it should be up to Gnome and KDE to make this fork happen. If they ever want to be recognized as a decent enviroment. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? " - all the communication is socket based (even if your machine runs the client and the server)"

I thought that if it was local, X would use shared memory?

Bit nitpicking though Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Guillaume touches upon the symptoms of my biggest problem with X: the drawing code being part of the server, and consequently its poor use of shared memory. The symptoms appear in the way redraw events are handled:

In practice: let's start with an example: a screen with 10 windows.
1. I click on my preferred window and move it
2. the first 'step' of the move will:
- ask the Xserver to move the window
- 5 windows are partly covered, so 5 windows receive an ExposeEvent these 5 windows redraws the needed part. A 'standard' part of a nice UI need to send more than 100 drawing requests (line, rect, font...) to the Xserver. If my GnomeCalc is right, it's about 500 requests at every 'step', if I want to be have the more smooth desktop on earth on my 100Hz screen, 500000 requests must be swallowed per second.... good luck, it's not going to happen! Remember, it was 'just' to move a window and it already consume 100% of my CPU.

The server can ask the client at any time to redraw any portion of any of its windows. Not only does this make the clients unnecessarily complicated, but it leads to visible performace problems.

Quartz handles this by either: using a shared raster buffer which the clients can draw to directly, or by building a PDF document in memory that the server can re-render at any time without consulting the client. Because of this there is no display corruption when an application stops responding or is slow to respond.

X further suffers from having to multiplex what is sometimes very heavy socket traffic. In some cases this is enough to grind the X server to a halt as a particular client passes a barrage of drawing commands.

In a properly designed window server, IPC should only be used for synchronization and event processing, and all drawing should take place through the use of shared memory buffers. Clients should only have to redraw the entire buffer in the event that the window is resized.

Note that Win32 uses a similar architecture to X. Redraw lag is most visible in Windows XP when using shaped windows (as XP does per default with the Luna theme) See:

http://fails.org/xp

(taken on a 2GHz Pentium 4 system with the lastest stable Nvidia drivers, GeForce4 MX, and on a Pentium III system with a Rage 128)

People attribute this display corruption to "programming errors" in Putty and Internet Explorer. However, I attribute these problems to fundamental flaws in Windows itself. It shouldn't be possible for such display corruption to occur during redraw events through "programming errors". I think these screen shots make clear that having clients handle redraw events just isn't a very good way of doing things.

Quartz has shown a better way of designing window servers, and after using it, any other window server seems outmoded and clunky. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? " - all the communication is socket based (even if your machine runs the client and the server)"

I thought that if it was local, X would use shared memory?

Apparently you missed the whole second half of the article. He starts out by discussing the SHM extension:

An interesting extension of XFree is the SHM one, it provides a new API (close to the XPutImage one) to transfer bitmap by using shared memory between the Xserver and the client.

He's talking about how X11 was originally intended to function with the first statement. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > However, I attribute these problems to fundamental flaws in Windows itself.

Bascule, you link these screenshots over and over. I told you in the past and I will tell it again: I am here with a much more slower PC than yours (dual Celeron 533, Voodoo5) and I don't see any of your problems with XP. I think your problem is buggy drivers, or drivers not interacting well with your PC. I would try a different gfx card before I attribute these specific problems to WinXP rather than the person who wrote the drivers. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Good job! I have just a fight on my mailing list: "why linux isn't good for a desktop" and this is one big reason - xfree it's damn slow :-) Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You have got to be kidding. You.. using a Voodoo5, are telling someone using an gf4 with the latest stable nvidia drivers to try a different gfx card? Defend XP if you want but I think you could have came up with a better alternative explanation. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I am here with a much more slower PC than yours (dual Celeron 533, Voodoo5) and I don't see any of your problems with XP. I think your problem is buggy drivers, or drivers not interacting well with your PC.

These are two token systems from which I've taken screen shots. I can certainly take more... these problems are present on every XP system I've used which uses any theme with window bitmasks. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > You.. using a Voodoo5, are telling someone using an gf4 with the latest stable nvidia drivers to try a different gfx card?

Sure. He's got the problem, not me.
And drivers behave differently on different machines. Bugs are always part of the program... Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? So.. if a geforce4 with nvidia's own drivers are the issue. Would you say that possibly the issue couldnt still be with XP. Especially since that combination of hardware/software seems to be at the top of the food chain on any other system? Or what card would you suggest? I do have several voodoo2/3's laying around if you are intrested in buying any. =)
Ok I admit it.. I hate XP. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Isn't this the same effect as when you took screen shots of bugs in Mozilla 1.1's XUL rendering? People claimed that was a problem with your video drivers, did they not? Well, do you think it was your drivers, or was it a bug in Mozilla?

The point is the problem exists, regardless of whether or not you're experiencing it. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Er... Eugenia... not all people had your problems with mozilla, but you said (and I was with you) that YOU had those problems, and that would be enough. But now someone says he has a problem with XP and you says you haven't any.... Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You are wrong. I never said that he does not have any problems. Please do not put words I never said.
I SAID that these might be DRIVER BUGS, which are very common. It is more common/logical to *suspect* the driver for these screw ups, rather than the whole GDI of Windows. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hello everybody.

Is the Gentoo's (v1.2) X server pre-patched with the SHM?
If no - where can I download if from ?

Thanks for your help in advance.

BR,
Arturas B. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? All I did, was to suggest to try another gfx card, which might help him locate the source of the problem. And you guys are attacking me for doing so. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? He's talking about how X11 was originally intended to function with the first statement.

I understand that now, but first read through (of both pages) read like he was suggesting something new. Local speedups have been around for a long time? Guess it is difficult to see if he is reporting or investigating

Quartz certainly is a very nice arch Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? All I did, was to suggest to try another gfx card, which might help him locate the source of the problem. And you guys are attacking me for doing so.

I did mention those screen shots come from two different systems with video cards from two different but both highly respected video card manufacturers (Nvidia and ATI)

I also mentioned I'd seen the same rendering problem on other systems besides these two.

This is definately a problem with the way XP handles window masks, and serves to illustrate the underlying issues with having clients redraw windows as opposed to the server. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 06:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Quartz certainly is a very nice arch ... OK so why MacOS X has the same problem than Linux + XFree : "it's damn slow". Thu, 10 Oct 2002 07:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? suggesting buggy drivers for an nvidia card is like suggesting he reboot to see if it goes away. Feh. I've seen the same corruption when dragging windows quickly about the screen. Don't act like it doesnt exist or it's a figment of his configuration. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 07:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? OK so why MacOS X has the same problem than Linux + XFree

One word: Aqua Thu, 10 Oct 2002 07:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I am not programmer, but I understand mostly of how it works and etc thought. I just check out at BlueEyedOS's website and it looks pretty insteresting. Is BlueEyedOS stable enough to use as main desktop, yet? Have anyone tried BlueEyedOS, yet?

Thanks for a great article! Thu, 10 Oct 2002 07:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Duh me, BlueEyedOS isn't ready to download... Forget my questions above, I need a sleep.. Nite.. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 07:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Using the Free generic drivers that came with Mandrake 9.0 at first, I noticed a definite speed improvement when I switched to using NVidia's drivers.

Obviously this isn't a solution for this fellow, but this is to say that X performance is most definitely affected by the quality of the driver you have.

I stopped buying ATI cards a while ago becasue of shoddy drivers. I think you might be surprised with the quality difference a simple GeForce 2 (64megs RAM) and good NVidida drivers make. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 07:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A500 had a 8Mhz cpu Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? One I experieced some similar things with Win2k as well as Win98[some years ago]! There's seems to be a bug or limitation on WinDOZE GFX Resources (Per App).

So if I wrote years ago on SHS-101 ( http://www.s-brandenburg.de/shs-101 ) for Windoze I got a lot of these extraordinary Windoze Behaviour!

Every Button you see in this app was at that point a bmp image resource! Even the knobs (consists of 60 Frames or so) were handled that way! The total number of pictures was about around 300! Sometimes there occured this
strange behaviour.

After days of checking my code without results,
I tried to put all frames of the knob into one larger picture! And it worked ...

You can still experience the same thing sometimes with the ppModeler app.

-A

PS:Maybe that I am wrong, maybe that there's another bug in the WIN32 API. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? When speaking of a XFree replacement people usualy mention DirectFB and Berlin, but there's another vaiable alternative - use DRI. DRI can be separated from XFree (see http://fbdri.sourceforge.net/ ) and OpenGL can be used to draw primitives and copy/blit bitmaps. All the problems that the author mentions are resolved - the communication is as direct as it can get, no useless coversions (most OpenGL implementations are optimized for all supported color formats - not just 32bit), blindingly fast blits(just don't use glCopyPixels, but textured rectangles) and transparency are supported, the memory of the graphic card can be used to store the bitmaps or alternatively the AGP memory can be used. Also each layer can be rendered into a separate texture so you won't have to update overlaping regions. And you get lots of new features that no XFree extention can give you. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yet another good article

This one full of good technical stuff

I wish it was longer though

As for drivers being a issue in XFree. Having a better driver is part of the solution but if XFree had more optomization then every system would benefit including those with bad or good drivers. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I know this is off-topic but what fonts are you using for the windows and the IE on pic "xp3.gif"? How do you get it work like that under IE?. I meant to email you but I was not able to.

Sulvas Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Amiga had an 8Mhz CPU, with special chips to accelerate blitting, and a typical Amiga window size, might be, for example, 500x150 at 2 bitplanes. And then, while it was quite responsive considering the hardware, it was by no means "instant". The Amiga graphics system (Intuition) was incredible for its time, but it's no miracle, and my system (RedHat 8.0 with a low-latency patch, on a 2.53Ghz, GeForce 4 Ti4200 with nVidia drivers, can, not suprisingly, outperform it. Perhaps it doesn't outperform it by as much as the jump in hardware would suggest. But, even under X-Windows with GNOME and KDE piled on top, and huge (for example, maybe about 1000x800x32 bitplanes) windows, my windows will glide effortlessly, and artifact-freely around my X-Windows desktop, with instant response. Web pages snap so quickly into my browser (especially under Konqueror!) that I occasionally wonder what's taking it so long, not realizing immediately that the page has loaded and displayed before I even moved the focus of my eyes from the address bar back to the contents of the web-browser window. I'm all for a faster X-Windows, but at this point it would merely be to reduce X-Window's CPU usage so that other software might be able to use it, not to speed up the visual speed.

Erik


Erik Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A500 had a 8Mhz cpu

Actually it was 7.14MHz, but there were turbo chips that boost it up to ~14MHz. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? .. or the ones included in XFree? Because I've seen extreme problems with speed on Radeon cards that are not present with other cards with the included drivers.

Secondly, XFree86 4.2.1 (current) is already faster than XFree86 4.1.0 from what I hear. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You might have read an article quoted on /., which points out the fact that our video cards are NOT optimized for system->video memory transfer. The AGP port doesn't help, since the manufacturer don't bother about memory transfer from outside.
Guillaume is right when he says that blitting in video memory is really fast. But when you have no more video mem, or when you want to activate opengl, what are the perfs?
On the other hand, what will the perfs of BlueEyedOS be when you will have to draw lines? I understand you want to blit everything. But this way, you will have perf issues when drawing lines (CAO). Thu, 10 Oct 2002 09:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://blueos.free.fr/Static.tar.gz
It's the missing 'link'.
Feel free to mirror it as much as possible.

On B.E.OS, lines are drawn in the concerned bitmap,
no perfs issues.

Regards,
Guillaume Thu, 10 Oct 2002 09:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >human readable functions like SetTitle(char*), SetSize(int with,int height), SetPosition(int x,int y), Show(), Hide()...

erm, looks a look like BeOS api Thu, 10 Oct 2002 10:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Amiga speeds : 7.14MHz for PAL, bit faster for NTSC as CPU speed was slaved to the custom chip's clock and hence to the video mode.

WinXP: Hmm, not played with XP much, but these look glitches caused by screen redraw not being slaved to refresh or similar - I guess still shots don't really tell the whole story though...

XFree - yep, X is an interesting system, but on a single desktop, its rather like using a sledgehammer to crack an egg. What is needed is a screen manager that has a simple API and uses efficient methods to render, but can forward draw requests to X where the window is on a remote system, and receive requests/input from a remote system to forward onto te actual screen manager. In other words, make X a wrapper around the screen manager, not a screen manager as a wrapper round X. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 10:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I did a few google searches and all I was able to find on installing this was for NetBSD or development info.. so could a kind soul throw me a link explaining this - since I'm apparently to dumb to do it by myself on my trusty Linux... Thu, 10 Oct 2002 10:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Guillaume,

On the B.E.OS website I read that windows in 'normal mode' are drawn into a shared buffer and blitted to the framebuffer instead of drawing directly to the screen.
This, of course, improves performance.. like said on your site.

But why don't you submit this back to the XFree project so that everyone can enjoy better performance?
(and it would be even more cool if those buffered windows could be drawn during the vertical synchronisation

Just wondering...

(oh, and pcmiiw) Thu, 10 Oct 2002 10:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Guillaume's notice: Eugenia is not a native english speaker, so please excuse any grammar mistakes.

Sorry, I had to....

Please mod me down

*runs away* Thu, 10 Oct 2002 10:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > After days of checking my code without results,
> I tried to put all frames of the knob into one larger picture! And it worked ...

Not a huge surprise, there are various hard limits in Windows on the number of windows and GDI objects, both globally and per-process. The actual limits vary from version to version.

MS introduced the imagelist control with win95 to help get around exactly this problem. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 11:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I liked this article. I think that reinventing the wheel is stupid. X always was used in high-performance graphic workstations like SGI with Irix.

The only problem with XFree (a particular implementation of X) is imaturity of drivers and lack of tweaks like the autor suggested.

B.E.OS for me is the only BeOS clone that will have a chance to not be only another geek toy. Using the popular linux kernel and XFree will assure that it will have many device drivers. Sorry, but the original BeOS will die because it will not have drivers for future hardware.

XFree project could make a easy "driver kit" and donate to video adapter makers, to incentivate certified drivers. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 11:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The only things I can think of that cause those kinds of screen redraw problems are:
1) the system is bogged down (has little/no resources left)
2) One of the windows in the image has stopped responding

Of course, another issue is that a window moved around the screen very quickly will not redraw it's entire surface while moving or resizing (to preserve resources), so if you take a screenshot in the middle of such an operation, you can get a shot that looks really bad, even though you normally wouldn't notice the problem at all. With certain types of resources visible in the background, it's fairly easy to reproduce these types of images on any graphics card with any given drivers, but under normal operation, if your system is not running into resource problems, you wouldn't notice it a great deal. Whether or not you're using the standard XP themes should have no affect on this unless, again, you're running into resource problems (CPU/RAM/vid limitations).

Other than that, a GeForce4MX is NOT a GeForce4 by any stretch of the imagination except in name, it's just a faster GeForce2MX, which is just a memory-restricted GeForce2GTS. The video card still is not the problem there, as I'm running a TNT2 Ultra, GeForce2 GTS (64MB), and ATI Rage Ultra, all of which rarely display any problems at all, and the TNT2 and GeForce2 are probably running the same driver versions. I also tend to run far more programs at once than are visibly running in those shots (but hey, if you really want to see this on your own system, find an app that kills your CPU and/or RAM usage and then move a window around in front of it). Thu, 10 Oct 2002 11:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >But why don't you submit this back to the XFree project
>so that everyone can enjoy better performance?
Because I use XFree to reach this speed, it can't be merged, XFree need to be improved/modified as suggested in order to something "interesting". Improvment must not be 'on top' but 'in depth'.

> Amiga500: frequency 7.14 Mhz
Sure, but my A500 is a custom one and my Amiga 1200 is powered with a 68060 a 50Mhz!

> Radeon driver
I use the one provided with XFree4.1

> DRI
Nice concept but 3D oriented, I only wanted to cover the 2D part(even if I mentioned that the 3D acceleration solve a lot of issue).

Regards,
Guillaume Thu, 10 Oct 2002 11:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sorry, but the original BeOS will die because it will not have drivers for future hardware.

http://www.yellowtab.com/ - BeOSr5 developed further and will be shipped with alot of new drivers

http://www.bedrivers.com/ - BeOS driver development

IMO, yellowtabs Zeta may keep the die-hard BeOS users until OBOS becomes an option.

People going to Cosmoe/Blue will probably be mostly linux users - often with some previous experience of BeOS Thu, 10 Oct 2002 11:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? DRI
Nice concept but 3D oriented, I only wanted to cover the 2D part(even if I mentioned that the 3D acceleration solve a lot of issue).
You can do 2D rendering with OpenGL. Just set an orthographic projection and use Vertex2f calls (or for instance use Interleaved arrays with one of the V2F types), draw the bitmaps as textured rectangles( with disabled mipmapping and texture filtering). Most of the GPU silicon is devoted to the 3D core and it will be a shame not to use it. I think OSX Jaguar can use OpenGL for rendering the GUI and Windows Longhorn will use DirectX.
Another DRI advantage is that most 3D accelerators (except the NVidia ones) have DRI drivers that can be easily ported to fbDRI. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This was a pretty good article. I'd just like to add some things on top:

1) Qt and GTK+ don't use XFree as efficiently as it could be used. They do a lot of rendering, in software, in client space and send a lot of bitmaps to the server. I don't know what kind of problems drawing lines and whatnot the author was having, but on my system, I get about 194,000 lines per second, a whole lot more than what the author got. In reality, (with good drivers), letting the server do the rendering is a much better idea than shipping a large amount of data through a socket.

2) Quartz's bites. It has so much potential, using a 100% vector graphics API, but it keeps hundreds of megs of giant bitmaps around. In my Linux install (KDE 3.1-beta2) I can move (and resize and whatever) Windows all I want and there is no flickering or redraw lag in properly written (KWord, etc) applications. And I can actually use all the RAM in my laptop instead of having 640MB just so Quartz runs acceptably.

3) You can't "install" SHM. It's already built into every X server. Qt 3.x uses it for some operations (big pixmaps) by default.

4) fbDRI is a great idea. Something like that combined with EVAS and E17 is exactly what Quartz should have been. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, by default the MIT-SHM extension is compiled for XFree86. Also if you haven't been following the XFree86 development lately major changes are coming especially for XFree86 5.0 =)

Check out http://www.xfree86.or/~keithp/talks

Lots of good new extensions being added. In the current cvs snapshots you can now change the mouse cursor and ge shadowing like XP.

-ShawnX Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sorry that should be:

http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/talks

I'm typing on a blackberry (RIM) ;-)

-ShawnX Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The Amiga 500 ran a 68000 Motorolla processor at 7.14MHz, not 14MHz. It also came with half a megabyte of ram, although later on this was moved to 1mb and older 1/2mb models could be upgraded to 1mb (the size of an Amiga 500 512kb memory chip was large than a mouse!). Thu, 10 Oct 2002 13:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "the size of an Amiga 500 512kb memory chip was large than a mouse!"

Memory CARD, the A501 512K upgrade card to be exact. Brave persons however just soldered the necessary components to the motherboard. With the A500 you could also plug a SCSI adapter into the zorro socket, and gain a 40MB SCSI drive and an additional 4MB of Ram. You can get your A500 up to 50MHz and 32MB of Ram with the Derringer 030 accelerator. I'm a bit rusty, so you may be able to go well beyond that too today. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 13:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Any downloadable binary previews yet? Besides screenshots maybe?

(What's so wrong about open development, heh?) Thu, 10 Oct 2002 13:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? gybe: OK so why MacOS X has the same problem than Linux + XFree : "it's damn slow".

Blame Aqua, not Quartz

Aqua is ridden with eye candy, useless eye candy.

Besides, Bascule, I can't see your problems on my machine (using Intel 3D, BTW), using IE (couldn't find the other app on the Net), doesn't have this problem. I had the same problem as Eugenia on the Mozilla issue, but if weren't for her, I wouldn't have realize it (it is so fast, you need to use the Print Screen button to see it). Thu, 10 Oct 2002 13:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? gelato, can you please expain what a "framebuffer console" is? I understand that a framebuffer is an area of memory (usually on the video card) that holds (one frame at a time) a bitmap of the entire screen that is to be displayed.

I always just thought a console was synonymous with a "terminal window", an xterm. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 13:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You state that you used XFree86 4.1.0 (an outdated version) and the included driver (a driver known for poor performance). Did you at least try out XFree86 4.2.x or the binary Radeon-drivers before you wrote the article about XFree86's faults?

Some of your speed problems could easily be due to a poor driver.

I'm not saying XFree86 is perfect, but before you write an article about it's speed, with benchmarks and possible speed tweaks, you should at least have tried to figure out wether some of the problems could be related to your particular setup. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 13:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? gelato, can you please expain what a "framebuffer console" is?

IMO the term "framebuffer console" is misleading in the context of fbDRI. Probably they named it that way because fbDRI is intendended for consoles that have direct access to the framebuffer (e.g. don't run on top of X or any other window system ).
The best way to describe fbDRI is - a standalone DRI that works without X.
DRI was designed to allow direct access to the graphic system by bypassing X and most OpenGL implementations on Linux are built on top of DRI. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 13:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I see the very same things in XP on a daily basis that Bascule's examples show. I love how its always "buggy" drivers when theres a problem with Windows but its Xfree86's problem when it acts slow and not the fact that most of its drivers are written by the video card vendors. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 14:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Bascule, the problem (and i understand, cuz your a windows basher!), is that windows xp can use very generic drivers for nvidias and ati's cards, you can even have bigger resolutions and screens with those drivers (Wich was not possible in previous versions of windows), and all looks like windows detected the right hardware, but make a little research in hardware manager, and you'll find that it's then wrong driver for your card.

It happens a lot, people think that windows has detected and installed the good video driver by default, but it did not.

Update drivers, that's all, and stop making a foul of you. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 14:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? So, when you boot up a system with fbDRI but no X, you get a "console"? -- that is to say, the command line. And from there you can run graphical (OpenGL based) programs that then "take over the console"? Maybe that's it. Dunno.

I get the impression that there's too many words here with overloaded meanings: console, terminal, tty, tty0, and xterm.

There are no docs over at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/fbdri/

The fbDRI download is a little over 11 MB, so I'm sure I'll find some docs in there. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 14:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Just loaded up 10 instances of putty. If i drag a putty window over other putty windows the problem appears. If i drag it over other windows (Bersirc, Explorer [not ie]), etc it draws perfectly fine. If i drag over explorer windows with a page loaded, the problem appears as well.

So whats this tell you? That putty and explorer draw slow. They sit too long in their WM_PAINT handler, its not that they aren't getting the messages or are missing them, or theres some hidden problem with how the gdi draws. They just draw slow. Having written a faked console app (like putty) i can tell you, this effect goes with the territory. Every character is parsed out individually (it supports ansi emulation you know) so.. ta da. Solution? Use telnet.exe instead or ssh.exe from binutils. Sure it happens on all the computers you'll try it on, until you find a 3ghz one perhaps. At any rate, its the app, not windowsxp. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 14:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >> At any rate, its the app, not windowsxp.

And it can be fixed by using those shared buffers

Heck, EVERYONE should use buffers!
Buffers rule!
Buffers make your life smooth! Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? On XFree4.2 , GeForce4 MX 420
- draw 79500 lines/s
- copy/blit 3360 100x100 bitmaps/s from RAM to FB (or RAM to GRAM)
- copy/blit 18300 100x100 bitmaps/s from GRAM to FB (or GRAM to GRAM)

For the 2 first operations, its 3-4 faster than with the Radeon, but for pure blitting, it's a bit slower.
Anyway, it changes nothing at the conclusion, XFree is fast
(and faster on GeForce4 ) but it needs a lot of improvments.

If you need binaries: http://blueos.free.fr/Static.tar.gz
it's still faster than any X window manager

Regards,
Guillaume Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >> Because I use XFree to reach this speed, it can't be merged, XFree need to be improved/modified as suggested in order to something "interesting". Improvment must not be 'on top' but 'in depth'.

I see, I think I misunderstood you the first time..

About the demo:

I've made my own demo once (or actually a small wm), which used OpenGL to render its windows.
However, this demo looks like it's also using OpenGL..

Is this really just plain XFree or just OpenGL? Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The Radeon drivers he has are extremely poor. My x11perf numbers (nvidia driver) are anywhere from 3x (in the case of filled rectangle and putimage) to 10x (in the case of lines) as what he shows. Previous benchmarks I've done against Windows 2000 show that these totally blow away the GDI (especially line performance) while the blit performance easily matches DirectDraw 7. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hmm... can't find the mailing list for fbDRI.

Also, the homepage mentions this:
The dri source code documentation, except for the Jens Owen parts, is pretty bad, with many indirections making it hard to follow. Most of the indirections should be eliminated in FB dri and a monolithic libglfb.so binary created for each card.

After downloading and unpacking, I found that the doc directory only contained a mirror of the homepage. There's also a Readme containing a couple of email addresses and phone numbers.

Looks like it hasn't been touched since August 2001. [shrug] Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? So, when you boot up a system with fbDRI but no X, you get a "console"?
Sort of. You run an application that is fbDRI based from the console. Just like you type startx to run X. That application can be for instance quake or a full-blown window manager(with many GTK, QT and B.E.OS apps running on top of it). That window manager will use OpenGL to draw lines and rectangles and blit bitmaps instead of using the X Window System API. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In fact, it is much more like to be a driver issue, simply because Nvidia has ALWAYS sucked when it comes to 2D, sure they get great 3D, but 2D is just pure and utter crap when you are with nVidia. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hmm... can't find the mailing list for fbDRI.
....
Looks like it hasn't been touched since August 2001. [shrug]

Yup, it looks like the project is not active currently. It's still a nice proof of concept - that DRI can be made to work without X. And a base for porting other OpenGL drivers (besides the Radeon one) to work without X.
fbDRI is not realy required. The standart DRI + OpenGL on top of X can also be used to implement a window manager. It's just that X will be an unnecesary burden. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I love how its always "buggy" drivers when theres a problem with Windows but its Xfree86's problem when it acts slow and not the fact that most of its drivers are written by the video card vendors.

Am I wrong in thinking that nVidia makes the drivers I use on any given platform (except those that they haven't released drivers for)? I found a long time ago that if I used the drivers that either Windows or the graphics card manufacturer (as opposed to nVidia) supplied, the version was much older than the reference drivers, and performed accordingly. For most people it's not a big deal, because the basic drivers do well for 2d graphics, but once you get into 3d you really have to have the latest drivers from nVidia to get the best performance.

n fact, it is much more like to be a driver issue, simply because Nvidia has ALWAYS sucked when it comes to 2D, sure they get great 3D, but 2D is just pure and utter crap when you are with nVidia.

I thought it was shown a while back (when the GeForce4 was first released) that nVidia 2d problems were due to the hardware that graphics card manufacturers were using for the 2D rather than anything that nVidia was supplying (the graphics chip itself and the drivers). Now if I could only remember which company made the cards that showed this so I could point out the reviews... Thu, 10 Oct 2002 15:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://blueos.free.fr/Static.tar.gz is plain XFree.
Feel free to send me your OpenGL wm, in order to
see if it's "fast enough".

Regards,
Guillaume Thu, 10 Oct 2002 16:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Ok.. per Marios comment about beos nd clones are doomed to being "geek toys".
I gotta ask, WTF is that? What does that mean? Not long ago, home computers PERIOD were considered "geek toys" to the uninterested masses that didnt bother to educate themselves to the real implications of home computing. I really can't quite grasp what people are trying to say when they dont understand something and start tossing "geek toy" or "hobby OS" labels around. Besides, as this site, and others, show via the fiscussion boards, the world is full of geeks. So if something is a geek toy, it has a pretty good chance of being popular in a real sense. For example, the Matrix was a horribly stupid movie, but it had geek appeal, and was quite popular.
Further, what is the flipside of "geek toy"? Is it something along the lines of "used by non-geeks the world over..."? So then i suppose shoes must not be geek toys. Oh, and I guess Windows is non-geek toy. So that must mean that in order for something to be taken seriously, it has to be windows. Weird Thu, 10 Oct 2002 16:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Guillame
Great story , nice to read a technical article by a coder with facts represented
within the article .
good luck with the b.e.os Project, im looking forward to using it on my xbox

Bascule I agree with the initial post you made, looks like a bug and not a draw error.

Eugenia I'll happily buy that dual system from you With the voodoo5 card..
and again ... i agree... its your site.. ...people
should try to keep the comments
on a more professional level, discussing matters in a way that will spawn a greater/better development cycle!

geleto *cough EVAS cough*

rajanr one of the apps bascule is using is "putty" an ssh telnet client Thu, 10 Oct 2002 16:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Guillaume, what x11perf options are you using? I'm using an MX-440 (just a hair faster than your 420) and I'm still getting numbers twice as high as yours.

x11perf -line500 : 194 K/sec
x11perf -shmput100 : 7 K/sec
x11perf -copypixpix10 : 1750000 = 175 megapixels/sec
x11perf -copypixpix100 : 39.5 K/sec = 395 megapixels/sec
x11perf -copypixpix500 : 1.9 K/sec = 477 megapixels/sec

I'm using an optimized Gentoo server, but that shouldn't be a major factor. The only thing I can think of is that my processor is a lot faster (2GHz P4). Since this is an accelerated test, however, the processor shouldn't be much of a factor either. If the 2x performance difference was because of processor speed, then the server would have to be 100% the bottleneck, which not only seems unlikely, but isn't supported by the data. The results show that the card itself seems to be bottlenecking at 500 megapixels per second. Also, the 10 pixel case has excellent performance (given that it requires 50 times as many commands to be sent to the card as the 100 pixel case) seems to indicate that both the Xserver and the client-server link are fast enough to drive the hardware at maximum performance. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 16:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Thanks for the static binary. Do you have a link to the source so that I can play around with it?

Thanks. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 16:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I used :
x11perf -putimage
x11perf -line500
X11perf -copypixwin

From Redhat7.3 (XFree4.2) with NVidia drivers
(Yes, I wanted to play Unreal2003 )
on a Pentium4 (512k of cache) at 1.7Ghz
with a GeForce4 MX 420 64MB DDR.

Rayiner Hashem, could you give me your first impression of the 'binary', even with twice raw perfs, you will 'see'/feel something the issue of XFree. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 16:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Xfree86/x11/wm/kde/gnome/qt/gtk+

Layer on Layer on Layer.. That's why it sucks! Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does anybody know any good links to docs about the architecture behind XFree86/X11?

I am bit curious about how the Windowmanagers in X11 works. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, I know, it's got nothing to do with the performance of X, but it struck me while reading this article and the interview with the RedHat people.

Why doesn't X do sound?

Think about it: Although it's called a graphics system, X is really more of a terminal system. After all, it handles not only graphics, but also input, just like basic Unix terminals have text output and input.

Surely on a typical desktop machine with speakers, those speakers are part of the "terminal" - hell, there are monitors with in-built speakers!
So X should acknowledge the fact that terminals today no longer look like terminals a decade ago and handle sound as well. It's the most logical solution, and it would really solve a number of problems that have appeared, such as the multitude of sound system, the permission on /dev/dsp and things like that.

Of course, that's unlikely going to happen :/ Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >>XFree86 4.1.0 (an outdated version) and the included driver (a driver known for poor performance).

not to mention in mdk 9 everything is compiled with gcc 3.2 and that alone makes a huge difference in performance. I have it installed on 3 machines (amd 1ghz 512 ram, dual pII 400 mhz 256 ram, laptop pIII 500 mhz 256 ram)

I have seen huge performance gains over mdk 8.1 in the whole system.

and isn't the new glibc 2.3 supposed to also help with performance?

not to mention stuff in the kernel like the preemp and low latency patches (not included in mdk 9 i don't think)

there is more to performance than just X (though X does need a lot of work) Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I thought (like most here) that he was having a problem with his video card drivers. But I tried it too. I can replicate the same problem here. I have Asus GeForce 3 Ti200 (using latest driver)

I only opened 8 notepads, My Computer and Outlook XP. Then wiggled around the My Computer window. It left some controls unpainted... Very interesting... Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Um, you have no clue what you're talking about. The layering is as follows:

Application -> Toolkit (GTK+ or Qt) -> xlib -> Xserver.

That's the same layering as in any other OS. Take Windows.

Application -> Toolkit (Common Controls) -> Win32 -> GDI.

And the same in OS X.

Application -> Toolkit (Aqua) -> Quartz -> lwwp (light-weight window process).

The WM appears nowhere in the layering. It's a third part that controls window movement. It only comes into play when moving/resizing windows. As for other layers (for example glib in GTK+) those support libs are there in the Windows and Mac toolkits as well, but because GTK+ development is open, you get to see what stuff they use to implement the functionality. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 17:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Why doesn't X do sound?

There is NAS, the Network Audio Server, which is exactly what you want. http://radscan.com/nas.html

-fooks Thu, 10 Oct 2002 18:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? See all...

Firstly...

Guillaume and I, several times posted some comments about the news that appear here.

WE NOT HAVE any formation about the english language. He speak FRENCH and I PORTUGUESE! I learned english reading books and navigating in web. In Brazil, the things are harder. Our country is poor!

I come from a country that the languages like french, portuguese, italian, spanish and arabic MIXED. Here we have a true desorder. Then, please, I'm not wanting begin a war about this issue and teach a cleric pray too! YOU ARE NATIVES, we not!

Secondly....

Thanks for all that believe in our work and contribute of any form!

Want know more? JOIN US!!!!!!!!!!

Michael Vinícius de Oliveira
BlueEyedOS Webmaster Thu, 10 Oct 2002 18:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is totally off-topic, but since you both were bringing it up at the beginning of the long line of posts, I figured I would ask.

As I said the other day in a different post, after a few years of not using Windows, I am using it again for a project I'm currently working on. I installed XP and Office XP. The screen redraw problems that Bascule has illustrated are a huge issue for me as well. If I open a Word XP document with graphics in it, I cannot see them since they become "squashed" into piles of colorific goo. The only way to correctly view a graphic in Word is to center the graphic in the window and then hit the maximize or restore button. However, once I start scrolling through the document again, it screws up the graphics and surrounding text again. I have Windows installed on 3 machines, each with a different video card (3dfx Voodoo3, ATI Radeon 7500, and GeForce 3 Ti) and have the same results on all three; even after updating all the drivers.

I am not sure what the problem is, but it is very annoying. If either of you figure out how to fix it, please let us all know since I'm sure there are others out there who are kicking XP for the same reason. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 18:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There is NAS, the Network Audio Server, which is exactly what you want. http://radscan.com/nas.html

Now if it were actually integrated with X...

Ideally, the sound card would be just another X device like the graphics card(s) and input device(s).
Of course, you could also go the reverse way and split X up into a graphics handling part and an input handling part. This would be a consistent design, too - although input routing (focus and so on) will sure be difficult in that design. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 18:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Bascule, you link these screenshots over and over. I told you >in the past and I will tell it again: I am here with a much >more slower PC than yours (dual Celeron 533, Voodoo5) and I >don't see any of your problems with XP. I think your problem >is buggy drivers, or drivers not interacting well with your >PC. I would try a different gfx card before I attribute these >specific problems to WinXP rather than the person who wrote >the drivers.

I have a newer PC (dual Athlons, Radion 8500 128 megs RAM) and I too see such problems in XP - note I do not see them all the time, but they do appear. I've seen them on other peoples boxes too. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 18:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There is a reason X does input, because the mouse and keyboard are intimately tied to the windowing system. Sound, OTOH, is not. Ideally, X would depend on kernel modules to handle input duties, rather than use its own drivers, but because of all the platforms it supports, it simply could not do that portably. As for a standard sound server, there is one. aRts. Both GNOME and KDE have decided to standardize on it going forward. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 18:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I just tested the 'proof of concept' (and understood that I could move the different windows and it's really impressive. If you can achieve that "responsiveness" using Xfree, I guess that B.E.OS have definitively a great potential - I know that responsiveness is more that the display capability but it's a part of it.

Guillaume, you made your point ! Thu, 10 Oct 2002 19:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Shouldn't it be 320x240(or 200) and 1024x768, not 320x256 and 1047x768 in his examples? Anyone else pick up on that? Thu, 10 Oct 2002 19:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "IMO, yellowtabs Zeta may keep the die-hard BeOS users until OBOS becomes an option. "

couple of years ago...

IMO, Linux may keep the die-hard UNIX users until HURD becomes an option. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 20:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The Static.tar.gz works great on FreeBSD, when I use the brandelf to make it works on FreeBSD. However, the very small problem is colours on yellow tab and have more than two windows then move them around. It will blurring the colours and etc.

I know, this built for Linux, but wanted to try it on FreeBSD. Thu, 10 Oct 2002 22:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Great article!

I sincerely thank Guillaume for such an well put text and congratulate OSNews for this and Eugenia's last excellent reviews, too.

This ones deserves to be saved!

Keep this spirit, if you can! Thu, 10 Oct 2002 22:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Except Arts is terrible. It should be shot. Requires WAY to
much overhead, Latancy is far to high, and still gets in the
way of the audio device. Jack on the otherhand is going the
right direction. The only unfortunate side effect of using
jack is its lack of multiplatform compatiblity due to its reliance
of alsa(not a bad thing really). Fri, 11 Oct 2002 00:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Rayiner, it isn't about the layering.

It is the amount of toolkits, and all of them are inconsistent, UI-wise, between them. For example, in Mac OS X, you have two choices of native APIs, Carbon and Cocoa. Fri, 11 Oct 2002 02:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Layer on Layer on Layer.. That's why it sucks!
>>>>>>>>>>>
My post was a response to this specific comment. I was pointing out that the "layering" that certain (clueless) people see is no different from that on any other operating system. The inconsistancy is a seperate issue entirely. While I agree that there is a certain problem to the proliferation of toolkits, it's not as bad as people on this board think. There are tons of toolkits on Windows, too. You've got the Photoshop toolkit, the Office toolkit, the Windows common controls, etc. They mostly look the same, but underneath they are most definatley different toolkits. If you really want, you can theme the toolkits to look the same.

Now the whole consistancy issue is more hairy. First of all, "all the different toolkits" is overdone. These days, there are really only 2, GNOME and KDE. I highly doubt that the people who complain about multiple toolkits are using NEdit with Motif... These two environments interoperate quite well. They can embed each other's components, share the clipboard, etc. They're even moving towards unified media and print services. The interoperation isn't as good as with Windows toolkits, but it's really not that bad.

Second, the toolkits on Linux are more disparate then the toolkits in Windows, true. But its also easier to stick to one toolkit if you want. Unlike the Windows market, no particular applications have taken over the market, so you can use whatever application you want. For example, if you want an office app in Windows, you use Office. You get a totally different toolkit as a result. In Linux, if you use GTK+ you can use AbiWord. If you use KDE, you use KOffice. This situation really isn't apparent to Windows users or those people who try Linux for a little while then dump it. It's a different mindset. In Windows, you're used to one major application for each catagory. Need a media player? Windows Media Player is the obvious choice. Need an AIM client? You use AOL AIM, of course. It's not like that in Linux. After using it for a long time as my primary desktop (recently moving to a 100% Linux system after I got my laptop) my view on Linux has changed a whole lot. At first, I thought exactly like all those people raving on the OSNews messege boards. Outwardly, the Linux desktop is a mess. But over time, I've found that you can use great applications and still stay consistent. Today, every single app I use is integrated tightly into KDE. I use KOffice, Quanta, Kopete, Noatun, etc. If I were using GNOME, I'd use GNOME-Office (Abiword/Gnumeric), Bluefish, gaim, and Gst-Player. In only a few highly specific situations (GIMP, for example, is the only really good image editor) is it every necessary to cross the toolkit boundry. Was it a lot of work? Yes. It took a long time to find the perfect set of applications and tweek everything. But the fruit of my effort is that my desktop is utterly my own, perfect for my needs and uses, and completely internally consistant, far more consistant than any install of Windows (also heavily customized, btw) that I've ever used. Fri, 11 Oct 2002 05:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Rayiner.... sorry for misunderstanding your post (maybe quotes would be nice in replies next time....

Now, on your points. KOffice, to my opinion is many times better than GNOME Office (whatever it should be, doesn't integrate at all :-), and I use KOffice on GNOME 2.0 on Mandrake 9.0. Why? I find GNOME 2.0 "just nice"... at least until KDE 3.1 comes out.

But I find GNOME Office apps (except Gnumeric and Evolution) to be crappy. I wouldn't use it just because I'm using i'm using GNOME. But what's the problem? Copy and paste, drag and drop and so on becomes the problem. Half the time, it doesn' work.

Red Hat did well by themeing both Qt 3 and GTK+ 2, but what happens if you have a Qt 2 app? (I do... Opera).

Now, this discourages third party development. Just say Bill Gates' daughter comes home with a Microtel LindowsOS machine. She goes to Bill, saying "Daddy, can you loan me a hundred bucks? I need to subscribe to CNR so I can get StarOffice 6.0". Now, not only did Gates panic that his daughter is using Lindows, but wants to use StarOffice 6.0. So he creates Linux BU. At Linux BU, the developers there pick the toolkit for Office:linux, "Which one should we use? Qt or GTK+ [let's pretend they don't care abotu QT licensing, shall we?]..... hmmm, if we use GTK+, we care get our software ported fast. But most of our target market uses KDE, and would be turned off by the idea of using a GTK+ app..."

Now, if GTK+ and Qt as UI consistent, guess what? They can pick GTK+ for their Office port without worrying that their app wouldn't look inconsistent in KDE.... nor any other desktop on Linux. Fri, 11 Oct 2002 05:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you have color corruption which double the size of the bitmap, check that you have a 32/24bits display.

Regards,
Guillaume Fri, 11 Oct 2002 09:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There are tons of toolkits on Windows, too. You've got the Photoshop toolkit, the Office toolkit, the Windows common controls, etc. They mostly look the same, but underneath they are most definatley different toolkits. If you really want, you can theme the toolkits to look the same.

There isn't nearly as much overlap in the toolkits on Windows in most cases, until you start doing things like using Qt or GTK on Windows. When you add the Office toolkit you get some new things which replicate some of the functionality of items in the Common controls, such as 'CoolBars', which perform the same function as Toolbars, and OfficeXP uses a lot of mouse-over functions and such in it's display, but overall most of the items used in Office's dialog windows still come from the Common controls, rather than the Office controls (because most of the items don't have replacements in the Office control set; the fact that Office apps are so dependant on toolbars and menus for their interface do make the Office controls a significant change from other Windows apps, though).

Swing, GTK, Qt, etc are the exception in Win32 apps, where the majority (if not all) of the controls are replaced by something other than what's used in the rest of the system. The fact that applications using those toolkits are not using the native controls can sometimes be a reason that some people don't use them in the first place.

On the other hand, some things implemented at the toolkit level in Linux are implemented at a lower OS level in Windows, such as the clipboard (though Office adds another layer to the clipboard to store multiple entries and preserve format). The move towards interoperability between toolkits on Linux could eventually lead to many things becoming a shared implementation, which would be a good thing, imo, though people are always free to hack away at it if they feel they have a better way of doing it. Fri, 11 Oct 2002 16:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? first my benchmark results (celeron 366, geforce4 ti 4200)
x11perf -line 500 307000/s
x11perf -putimage100 664/s
x11perf -copypixwin100 62800/s

the same with opengl (using gltest from mesa distribution)
lines (480) 981151/s (~3 times faster)
zsmooth tex blend triangles (100) 499395/s (~4 times faster with transparency and other neat stuff blending can do for you)

there's no test similar to putimage, but i'm afraid it probably wouldn't be much faster since glTexImage2D is rather slow, but there certainly is room for improvement

conclusion: i think opengl could/should be the new rendering api of X, since it already has fast direct implementations, over-the-wire protocol (GLX) for remote access and very clean api, as for now it would be nice if someone could port gtk/qt to use opengl, the gtk->opengl port is on my todo list, but since i have millions of other ideas/projects, i doubt i will do that Fri, 11 Oct 2002 17:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Take a program in which you can make the window translucent or opaque. For example Winamp3.

When it's opaque, all the windows are redrawn when it is moved around quickly, and the screen gets the mess shown in the aforementioned screenshots.

Now make it translucent (in Winamp3 - press the "+" button in the top left corner, and then "Opacity"->[anything below 100%]). Now move the window around... no mess!!
You can even take a window and move it *under* Winamp (make Winamp always-on-top), and there will be a mess where this window moves over other windows, but not below Winamp (or probably any other translucent window you'll take).

Why isn't it used for every window? Probably because it will require memory for storing the bitmap of every window in memory. But it is possible, and it's even there.

RK. Fri, 11 Oct 2002 20:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments