NVIDIA FreeBSD Kernel Feature Requests, interesting info for dfly?

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 05:04:22PM +0800, Bill Hacker wrote:
> Old or new branches of X are rooted in a very different architectural 
> philosophy than Win vid, and would have to start over from a clean slate to 
> even match the sort of performance of an Amiga, BeBox, Warp/eCS or OS X 
> deliver(ed) on comparable hardware.

While I agree on most point, this needs some comments. The problem of
current X11 based GUIs is not the protocol or architecture of the X
server. The 99% of the slowdown is to completely broken toolkit design.
Seriously, how could it have been possible to use a single 50MHz Power
CPU and a 10mbit network for a number of X11 terminals 12 years ago?
The difference is that applications and toolkits used an asynchronous
protocol and had been greatly optimised to keep as much work as possible
in the pipeline. Compare that to todays application. A simple GTK
program over a slightly laggy WLAN link is visibly drawing itself a
number of times whenever e.g. a menu has to be opened. *That's* why X11
performance today sucks. Everyone wants to program X11 like they program
Windows, completly ignoring the roundtrip time.

Joerg