Re: NVIDIA FreeBSD Kernel Feature Requests, interesting info for dfly?

[Bill Hacker <wbh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

Not sure DragonFly does C3 as well as 4.11, and reasonably certain DFLY is not 
AND-64 ready yet.

But we'll keep one eye open...

;-)

Bill