From freedesktop-xorg  Mon Aug 22 08:38:56 2005
From: Lars Knoll <lars () trolltech ! com>
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 08:38:56 +0000
To: freedesktop-xorg
Subject: Re: Xgl/Xegl future?
Message-Id: <200508221038.57083.lars () trolltech ! com>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=freedesktop-xorg&m=117278286630230

On Monday 22 August 2005 03:08, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 19:46 -0400, Michel D=C3=A4nzer wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 11:55 +0200, Christian Parpart wrote:
> > > Will it be possible to do such amazing things w/o hardware-OpenGL-bas=
ed
> > > X server?
> >
> > Yes. The major toolkits seem to be moving to GL backends,
>
> I can't speak for other major toolkits, but there is no current plan
> to do this for GTK+:
>
>  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2005-June/msg00166.html
>
> Is the mail of mine I keep pointing to. Having all the 30 or so
> apps that are running to make up your desktop be direct rendering
> clients just doesn't make sense. Translating RENDER primitives
> into GL and speaking GLX over the wire doesn't make sense.

And speaking for Qt I can only agree. You can't make all your 2d apps GL=20
based, and we currently don't have any plans to do so.=20

If Render is decently accelerated inside the X server there is actually no=
=20
need to do so. The reason that OpenGL based rendering of 2d apps is=20
interesting at the moment is because Render is dog slow on most hardware.

But we should fix the cause of this issue and not try to work around it by=
=20
making every IRC client an OpenGL application. So the thing needed at the=20
moment is to make sure Render gets decently fast on the server.=20

Exa is a step in this direction It provides a hook for DMA transfers of=20
pixmaps from Video memory to main memory that can make the software fallbac=
k=20
fast enough (though CPU intensive) and another hook for accelerating=20
composite operations. In the long term the more flexible solution will=20
however be XGL.

Cheers,
Lars