Re: XF86 and full-screen graphical console apps

[Magnus Norddahl <mbn@dark.x.dtu.dk>]

Quoting Johnny Taporg (taporg@yahoo.com):

> The issue here makes a lot more sense now - it's
> personal.  You wanted accel which you didn't get,
> and you want to share your disappointment with us.

Exactly. I don't want others to waste time doing a pointless X implementation
with pixmaps, when you get better performance by doing a much more naive
approach.

I'm also writing it to try make people aware, that Linux isn't better than
Windows when it comes to everything. If you ask most Linux users, they would
say gcc does a good job when optimizing - but that's plain wrong. The same
thing goes with some parts of XFree86. Before these things can be improved,
people must realize they are bad...

> Anyhow, the accels in xf86 look fine.  Even for blits,
> they should be ok.  The found it hard to believe that
> pixmaps were always stored in memory, so I researched
> the source to make sure.

I didn't check it myself, but the one of main developers on the 4.0 XFree86
branch (Mark something) said that they were always stored in system memory
(in the 3.x versions).
It doesn't matter much to me how easy it is to actually store the thing in
vidememory, because if none of X servers does it, I cannot use an
implementation that depends on that - and I cannot change all the X servers
to use hardware accelerated blits.

> overflows to system memory).  And only recently has
> using video memory for pixmaps become an issue.  But

Well, for the last three years... But of course, that is recently when
thinking of the speed XFree86 moves...

> the xf86 is certainly modular enough to make the
> addition of this kind of routine painless, so I'd be
> willing to put money on this feature being part of
> xf86 4.0.

I think so. At least that was the impression I got. But it's not just video
memory pixmaps. XFree86 need some kind of extension to do fast colorkeying
(transparency) and other similar common features on new gfx cards. It's not
that it is a pain to implement them - there's just nobody doing it right
now...

--
Magnus Norddahl
ClanSoft