RFC: server-side XCB

[Christian Linhart]

There is already a project underway to do this.

We would have sent the technical proposal in a few days.
I will send the technical proposal as an extra message, soon.

In any case we should avoid that two teams are working on that independently.

We have two interns at Xorg who are working on this under my mentorship:
* Asalle works as intern under the OPW-program ( http://www.x.org/wiki/XorgOPW/ )
  She will do the length checking and byte swapping.

* Jaya is an intern without any formal program behind it.
  She will implement server-side XCB in requests, replys etc,
  i.e. will replace the usage of the manually written proto-headers
  with using XCB.

Currently, both are setting up their work environment and getting acquainted with the code.
Both already have gained some experience with XCB during their qualification task etc.

Me, I have 17 years experience with the X-Server source-code, especially with protocol handling,
from work in a commercial project.

I have recently volunteered to become the maintainer of the XCB project.

And I do understand the code of the XCB codegenerator. ;-)
I have already made several changes to it, and more are in the pipeline.

I also have made lots of changes of the XCB protocol definition of XInput, with the goal of 100% coverage.
I will also complete the protocol definitions of the XInput and XKeyboard extensions'along with further changes in the XCB code generator.
(actually already finished with this. Just need to prepare this for posting on the XCB list.)

Cheers,

Chris


On 12/20/14 21:27, Jamey Sharp wrote:
>
> We've talked about doing the xserver equivalent of XCB for years--that is, auto-generating the protocol serialization and deserialization code from XCB's machine-readable descriptions of the X protocol and extensions.
>
> Considering the recent CVEs in that code, I think it's time. So I want to collect folks' thoughts on what server-side XCB should look like.
>
> At a high level, which code should we be generating? Off the top of my head, I'm thinking the dispatch tables and all the swap procedures, as a first target in order to get the codegen infrastructure merged and tested. Then it'd be nice to generate code that validates arguments and returns appropriate errors. Thoughts?
>
> XCB's code generator is implemented in Python. Can we make the same choice in the xserver build process?
>
> Anything else I should be thinking about?
> Jamey
>
>
>
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