LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

With the Render protocol, glyph images are no longer generated by the server but rather by the client who uploads a set of glyph images for a font. Typically, the client does use FreeType to render the individual glyph images. The server de-duplicates those images across all the clients and maintains the glyph image for later use by the client. When the client then renders some text it converts the string of characters into a set of (font, glyph index, position) tuples and sends that as a rendering request along with the operator to use and source pattern to apply. That request is passed to the driver, which typically prescans the request and uploads unseen glyphs into a texture atlas cache (using random replacement of old glyph entries to maintain fairness across all clients) and then converts it into a command stream for the GPU. By using a texture atlas, the number of state changes required for the command stream is minimised, though still one or two extra are incurred in order to adhere to the Render semantics.

In contrast, the core protocol differs in that the server renders the glyph images itself, and so has a fixed concepts of fonts and glyphs and needs to inform the client of the font/glyph metrics, and in the various semantics of the operators and patterns. That the core fonts were only bitmaps and so were easier for hardware to implement and are still faster than compositing glyphs using Render, is an implementation detail.