Xgl/Xegl future?

[Lars Knoll]

On Monday 22 August 2005 03:08, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 19:46 -0400, Michel Dänzer 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-based
> > > 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 
based, and we currently don't have any plans to do so. 

If Render is decently accelerated inside the X server there is actually no 
need to do so. The reason that OpenGL based rendering of 2d apps is 
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 
making every IRC client an OpenGL application. So the thing needed at the 
moment is to make sure Render gets decently fast on the server. 

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

Cheers,
Lars