Why not have X-Windows store the COMPRESSED image?
Posted Jun 29, 2006 10:08 UTC (Thu) by
kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to:
Why not have X-Windows store the COMPRESSED image? by dwheeler
Parent article:
Interview: Jim Gettys (Part I)
The big problem is that these images are stored so they can be quickly blitted to the screen. What graphics cards do you know that support lossless compression on images. Many would support JPEG/MPEG style, but lossless compression is a pain. Especially when you're going to want to read individual pixels from it (consider if a window partially overlaps the image you want to display).
Personally I think more use should be made of the XShm extension, when the client stores the images in shared memory and the X server can see them. One thing graphics processors can do is blit images and convert colour and layout on the fly.
I think what would really help is a way to see what pixmaps (and other resources) are currently stored in the server. That would make it easier to see if anything is being leaked.
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