X lib support for embedded systems.

[Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010, Mart Raudsepp wrote:

> On T, 2010-08-10 at 16:15 +0200, Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski wrote:
>>> Hello there.
>>>
>>> I am developing graphics system to one of our touch screen keypad.
>>> I planned to use fltk-2.0 to achieve the same.
>>> For this I required X11. But as the X11 is very huge, I wanted a slimmed down version of the same.
>>> Basically X11 and fltk must occupy not more than 20MB!
>>>
>>> Fltk basically uses these libraries from X11: -lXext, -lXft, -lXcursor, -lXinerma and -lXi.
>>>
>>> Can anyone help me in building X11 for my system?
>>
>> X windows is not appropriate for embedded platforms ,
>
> I disagree with that sentiment.
> X.org works fine on embedded platforms, and is used on such systems with
> success.
> In fact I have built a system on top of a touch screen with Xorg,
> including a full XUL based browser. My storage space limitation was
> 64MB, so I stopped optimizing for that after I got to a 43MB squashfs
> system.

i should have been add 'currently'.

i also recall long gone times when i could build 3.3.6
XFree which would run on 486 with 8M of ram , and squash the 
(static!) binary
to just 2M. perhaps with uclibc this could be even smaller.

main problem those times are long gone :/ numbers like 20M start to 
appear, and Xorg is not really optimised for embedded devices
performance-wise.

http://83.18.229.190/minimalistix_linux/static-binaries/XF86_SVGA
this one is static binary which is pretty old and has ~4M footprint, and 
since then i
could not build either anything smaller, or anything which would
perform better, even though i've tried many times.

actually uclibc Xorg binary i use atm (so dynamic linked) totals to
1.4M... and obviously one needs to include also drivers, xorg components, 
etc...

even though one could probably reach the '20M' limit, it consumes vast 
amounts of memory when running, and is painfully slow. definitelly not way 
to go when one needs to perform just simple task on embedded device...
except 'embedded' is just it's marketing buzzword.

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