NVIDIA FreeBSD Kernel Feature Requests, interesting info for dfly?

[Dimitri Kovalov]

--- Bill Hacker <wbh at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> 
> > 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
> 
> What is needed is really 'none of the above', IOW, there
> just *has* to be a 
> better way.
> 
> Two hints that it is possible include:
> 
> - the snappy browser interface included with the QNX demo
> floppy of many years ago.
> 
> - the Bluebottle/Greenbottle UI on Aos / Oberon.
> 
> Lean, light, quick across the ground, and nearly
> indifferent to what video 
> hardware is present, both of them.
> 
> Plan 9 is another. Not much to look at, but the
> 'plumbing' is straightforward 
> and low-load.
> 
> 'X' had a reason to live in its early distanced
> server-client incarnation.
> 
> Forget the KDE and Gnome resource hogs - even the
> so-called 'lite' desktops such 
> as Xfce4 are slow and clumsy compared to a well-tuned
> Warp/eCS Workplace Shell.
> 
> Most are arguably inferior to Win 3.11 in responsiveness
> and polish, given the 
> same hardware.
> 
> I don't see that much improvement is likely to happen on
> F/OSS - X or otherwise.
> 
> OS X has closed the gate at one end, Vista will retain MS
> dominance even if they 
> lose 30% of what is now a maket so huge an entity can get
> fats on the leavings.
> 
> While we are generalizing, the 'C' language has long
> since become more a part of 
> the problem than of the solution.... My tool of choice
> for I/O driver work was 
> AS or Forth with  native-code-compiler inlining.
> 
> Never mind... I know where I can get a couple of
> nearly-new 17" G4 PowerBooks 
> cheap when this one dies...
> 
> Meanwhile, back at the data centre, we have migrated the
> 1U servers to VIA C3 



> with  FreeBSD 4.11-stable and the 2U servers to Intel
> core-duo and FreeBSD 
> AMD-64 6.1-STABLE. Plus one Xeon using 6.1, i386.

Talk about an expensive boat anchor!

Dimitri

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