Bitmap cache

Bitmap cache

Posted Oct 9, 2007 18:49 UTC (Tue) by Blaisorblade (guest, #25465)
In reply to: Bitmap cache by Los__D
Parent article: Still waiting for swap prefetch

I've read time ago a comment from a OLPC developer on exactly this issue. I'm writing a summary of his comments I recall.
Basically, an application can store an uncompressed bitmap in the X server. And Firefox caches all images this way! That's the problem. Probably avoiding the caching would be even faster (due to no swapping).

IMHO (and this is my opinion, I don't recall his one) a reasonable solution would be to extend the X protocol to allow caching compressed images in most reasonable formats (including especially JPEG). Then the X server can keep a cache of most shown decoded images.

Since the JPEG compression ratio is huge, there would be a huge gain from this.

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