Linked by lopisaur on Fri 25th Jun 2010 22:21 UTC
Based upon a recent email to the X.Org developers' mailing list, Canonical is nearing the point of one of their goals for Ubuntu 10.10 of a rootless X Server, or being able to run the X.Org Server without root privileges.
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Member since:2006-11-13
XCB supposedly improves network performance considerably, but no toolkits use it as of yet.
I believe X.org (and actually Xlib) already uses XCB, but overall X11 performance is still very bad. Doing ldd against almost any X11 applications shows a dependency on libxcb.so - how much of XCB it uses, I don't know..
$ ldd gnome-terminal
...
libuuid.so.1 => /lib/libuuid.so.1 (0xb7231000)
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb7217000)
libpixman-1.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpixman-1.so.0 (0xb71d4000)
...
$ ldd xmag
...
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb7c4f000)
...
$ ldd /usr/lib/libX11.so.6
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xb8085000)
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb7f67000)
...
It's not just the remote protocol in X11 that is slow, everything related to windows are slow. I have a rather fast Nvidia and ATI video card, with proprietary drivers installed, but performance is not even close to what I get when I reboot into Windows. Simply dragging a window around shows tearing on the edges, dragging Firefox around using OSNews site shows really bad draw artifacts (never seen under Windows). The list goes on.
Member since:2006-01-02
Xlib only uses XCB essentially as a transport layer. It still has the same bad implementation on top of that.
I think you need to check your driver configuration or talk to some X.org devs because unless you have a really crappy gfx card (and it sounds like you don't), you shouldn't be seeing those issues. I have a T500 with a Radeon 3650 in it and it is quite snappy and I don't see artifacts or tearing. Compositing is also quite usable, which will significantly reduce flickering (just like in Windows Vista/7).
Member since:2008-10-23
It's not just the remote protocol in X11 that is slow, everything related to windows are slow. I have a rather fast Nvidia and ATI video card, with proprietary drivers installed, but performance is not even close to what I get when I reboot into Windows. Simply dragging a window around shows tearing on the edges, dragging Firefox around using OSNews site shows really bad draw artifacts (never seen under Windows). The list goes on.
This is not a performance problem, it is a vsync problem.
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Member since:
2006-01-02
The toolkits apparently make very bad use of the protocol, but the biggest culprit is Xlib. XCB supposedly improves network performance considerably, but no toolkits use it as of yet.