Breaking the X module ABI in 7.0 ?

Owen Taylor otaylor at redhat.com
Tue Apr 12 04:20:36 EST 2005


On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 19:29 +0200, Roland Mainz wrote:

> I have another example where this starts to hurt: Memory fragmentation.
> Currently the number one problem for long-running Xservers or Xservers
> running in memory-restricted environments such as Xterminal/Thin clients
> is memory fragmentation. Where does this fragmentation come from ? The
> primary source of this problem are pixmap allocations (well, teaching
> the GTK+ toolkit or Mozilla not to abuse pixmaps for obscure things such
> as double-buffering (ignoring the detail that there are the
> DOUBLE-BUFFER and MultiBuffer extensions) is likely not an option... ;-(

There's no reason why the GTK+ use of pixmaps for double buffering 
(which is the right way to do things, I'd claim) should cause memory
fragmentation ... it allocates *one* pixmap, draws to it and then
frees it. Even the worst possible allocator (and the current scheme
isn't much better than that) should do OK there.

						Owen

(No interest in making every GTK+ program permanently use huge amounts
of memory to maintain persistant back buffers. There are some
interesting things that can be done with Composite, but I don't think
there's much or any applicability of the old buffering extensions to
that.)

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