moving rootless out of the server

[Antoine Martin]

On 11/11/2011 08:59 AM, Jamey Sharp wrote:
> On 11/10/11, Alan Hourihane <alanh at fairlite.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 11/10/11 23:40, Peter Hutterer wrote:
>>> I wonder how much effort it would be to write a xf86-video-vnc that runs
>>> on xfree86 ddx.
> 
> That would be interesting to try, and there's some library out there
> for quickly building a VNC server into an arbitrary app. Or Alan's
> suggestion;
> 
>> xf4vnc already does. Just use the xf86-video-dummy driver and you have a
>> standalone setup.
> 
> Or use a modern implementation like x11vnc that uses COMPOSITE so it
> doesn't need any server-side code at all. :-) That's the approach
> we're trying to adopt in this new project.
This approach sounds very similar to the one used by Xpra [1]: FYI it
registers as a compositing window manager to capture the windows' pixels
which it then forwards to potentially remote clients.
Have you considered supporting this over the network? Wouldn't this be
very useful in the context of Wayland?
Are you also going to forward the bell, custom cursors, etc?
(those still fit within X11 whereas supporting things like dbus /
notifications is much more tricky)

I have added memory mapped pixel transfers to Xpra recently [2]
(obviously, this only works when the client and server are on the same
machine) which improved performance significantly, although there is
still too much memory copying going on. I suspect your solution will
target zero-copy where possible?

In any case, I am interested in your code as it may provide a
better (and probably faster too) solution to some of the problems Xpra
has to deal with. Please keep me posted.

Thanks
Antoine


[1] http://xpra.org/
[2] http://xpra.org/trac/changeset/273

> 
> Jamey