AIGLX, metacity, nvidia and Xgl

[Brian Paul]

Benjy Grogan wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2/23/06, *David Reveman* <davidr at novell.com 
> <mailto:davidr at novell.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I've been getting a lot of mail from people asking me about my thoughts
>     on AIGLX, the GL compositing work being done on metacity and nvidia's
>     xdevconf paper. Instead of replying to everyone individually, I though
>     I'd send a mail to the Xorg list.
> 
> 
> <snip>
> 
> 
>     I've been developing Xgl in the open since November 2004. Only the last
>     few months have been behind closed doors. I can agree that this wasn't
>     the best thing but no architectural changes have been made during this
>     period, just a lot of hard work implementing missing functionality,
>     tracking down and fixing bugs in xgl and various other places in the x
>     server tree. We didn't drop a finished solution, we dropped a much
>     improved version, that's all.
> 
>     At the time the decision was made to stop push things into CVS for a
>     while, no one except me was really contributing to the project and the
>     testing and bug reports we got from the community didn't give us much.
>     If we had to make architectural changes or if the interest in
>     contributing to the project got bigger, the idea was always to open
>     development again.
> 
>     -David
> 
> 
>     [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx
>     [2] http://developer.nvidia.com/object/xdevconf_2006_presentations.html
> 
> 
> 
> I would like to know what advantages Xgl or AIGLX will have other than 
> the eye candy.  Will it be possible to develop an application that will 
> use openGL and then be able to run the application remotely, as is 
> currently possible with gnome applications?

Sure.  That's a feature of the GLX interface and has nothing to do 
with gnome.


> Say if I were to develop a medical imaging application that allowed the 
> user to traverse a human skull, would I be able to run this program 
> remotely using Xgl, and only send GL commands using XML over the 
> network?  Is XGL related to the XGL File Format Specification 
> <http://www.xglspec.org/> ?

The XGL file format has nothing to do with the X-on-OpenGL window 
system (aka XGL).

Remote OpenGL rendering is done with the GLX wire protocol.  That's 
not going away (nor will it be replaced by a new XML-based protocol).

XGL (OpenGL-on-X) doesn't obsolete GLX in any way.


> There has to be more to these next gen desktop technologies than eye candy.

Of course.  Over the past years many of us have listed potential 
advantages to OpenGL-based X that have nothing to do with eye candy. 
If you're just coming to the party now, you've missed a lot of past 
discussion.

-Brian