lkml.org 
[lkml]   [1998]   [Jan]   [27]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
SubjectRe: OFFTOPIC: GGI and alternative GUIs and windowing systems in Linux -LONG
Date
From

alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk said:
> lbx is extremely effective and works well. dxpc also works very well.
> Both however dont solve the fundamental problems in some cases - large
> graphical images take a finite amount of space and time to transfer
> and even compressed its often sufficiently large to be annoying


I don't know how many of you remember sunview, but when I found myself trying
to convince colleagues to use X instead of sunview for the drawing retrieval
system we were building (big bitmaps) I heard the same argument, though
the communication was pipes, not a network.

Sunview, they argued, was in the kernel, and besides writing into the frame
buffer just had to be faster then writing through a UNIX pipe to another
process that in turn does the drawing.

Well, all this ignores many secondary effects. It turned out that X11R3
(what was current at the time) from MIT was several times faster at drawing
these C-sized bitmap images. And under certain conditions, putting a LAN
in the way actually *improved* the drawing performance.

Sunview in practice saved nothing in memory moves because the frame buffers
were virtual and copied to the real hardware as the drivers saw the need.
For things like text and line drawing, it actually increases the amount of
bit block copying.

Whenever multiple windows are involved, a server of some sort is inevitable.
X does it, sunview did it (but lied about it:-) and Windows does it. And
in any case, that bitmap needs to be delivered to the server, somehow.

X servers have an additional advantage of being able to cope with flaky
or dying programs. I don't remember what sunview did, but I know that
MS Windows does bad things. (I have seen cases on NT where it put the window
of a dead process on *TOP* and would not lower it:-)

There is, I think, still room for bumming X implementations and protocols
a bit before giving up on it.


--
Steve Williams "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve@icarus.com But I have promises to keep,
steve@picturel.com and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com And lines to code before I sleep."



\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:41    [W:0.063 / U:0.280 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site