22 Feb
2011
22 Feb
'11
11:11 p.m.
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 04:38:05PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
what its going to do,i think, is two-fold:
1) promote more and more toolkit design that makes everything just a
compositing stack. GTK has already moved significantly in this
direction, but could go a lot further.
....
Makes perfect sense. And indeed X is old, large parts of it
have become more or less useless, and there is certainly room
for something new. If and when that arises and gets 50% of the
maturity of X then I'll be happy to use it. Meanwhile I see no
reason to do so, certainly not if the only thing gained is to
make my software run on smartphones and other toys. It's just
not meant for that market.
2) more and more apps able to take advantage of
v-blank sync to reduce
computational load due to unnecessary redraws. instead, the whole
system will be a lot like a video-framebuffer version of JACK: the
vblank interrupt arrives. everything with a surface gets a chance to
redraw if it needs to, the surfaces are composited together, and boom,
its on the display.
Two remarks on this:
1. Syncing updates to the video frame rate of course makes sense,
and there is no reason why it couldn't be done in X. All it takes
is some support from the driver to generate an event at the right
time.
2. But at the same time this is sort of backwards. There is no reason
today why a computer display should be driven by a 'video' signal that
refreshes the complete screen at a fixed rate. *That* itself is very
old technology and completely useless in this age.
Ciao,
--
FA