X Server: abused or buggy?

[David Gerard]

2008/12/10 Charles Lindsey <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk>:

> HOWEVER, a compactor within the Xserver should, in principle, be possible,
> because large Pixmaps and the like are referenced by a serial number
> rather than by their address in (virtual) memory, and hence it should be
> possible to relocate them and simply alter the table that accesses them.
> That might need to be done in conjunction with a specially-written malloc
> for internal use within the Xserver, but specially-written mallocs are
> already in use in lots of other contexts.


Firefox went as far as adopting and adapting jemalloc to do this job
inside their own application given to large memory sizes,
fragmentation and leaks. So it's hardly unprecedented in an app that
does a lot of malloc churning.


- d.