Severe memory leaks make X.org unuseable

[milnser43200 at yahoo.com]

--- On Thu, 2/19/09, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> From: Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
> Subject: Re: Severe memory leaks make X.org unuseable
> To: milnser43200 at yahoo.com
> Cc: xorg at lists.freedesktop.org
> Date: Thursday, February 19, 2009, 5:47 AM
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:22:21 -0800 (PST)
> "milnser43200 at yahoo.com"
> <milnser43200 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > There are very serious and severe memory leaks under
> X.org with the savage driver
>
> You forgot to attach the fixes
>

I have looked at the source code for X.org and the savage driver. I cannot really quite understand it at all. Is there a guide to describe and document the X.org internals in detail?

> > At the same time important backwards compatability
> upon which many of our applications depend, have been
> removed including PEX, Ximage, MIT-SUNDRY, XFree86-Misc,
>
> You forgot to volunteer to maintain them - not that I find
> you
> believable. The idea that anyone uses PEX is rather
> implausible.

The number of apps which PEX, MIT_SUNDRY, and Ximage is probably a rather small number but certainly there have been apps written to use it. As for Xfree86-misc, I have heard that some modern screensavers use it to provide some feature that makes the screensaver work in a better manner and there has been concern over the disruption in useability this will cause. xscreensaver uses this extension. So yes removing it is a really bad idea.

I dont think that backwards compatability code should be removed "just because we dont dont think anyone uses it anymore", or "because we can". As far as I am aware these extensions were not causing any problems and I cannot see the justification to remove them. One of the prime missions of the X.org project should be to maintain backwards compatability with the X11 protocol and with extensions for applications which need them. We cannot make assumptions that there are not applications that uses these extensions which have been there for years.


> _______________________________________________
> xorg mailing list
> xorg at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg