Why not have X-Windows store the COMPRESSED image?

Posted Jun 28, 2006 21:58 UTC (Wed) by Yorick (guest, #19241)
In reply to: Why not have X-Windows store the COMPRESSED image? by dwheeler
Parent article: Interview: Jim Gettys (Part I)

That would certainly decrease memory usage but perhaps not at much as regenerating the
pixmaps. A compressed image is just a subroutine written in a very compact language
specialised for generating broad classes of images. The application's own code and data to
regenerate the pixmaps are in most cases already in memory, and the code can usually be more
efficient than a compressor would be as it is adapted to its purpose.

I could definitely imagine compressed pixmaps being a useful way to lower the memory
requirements of existing applications. It just needs some heuristics to avoid compressing those
used frequently.

On a lower level, compressing memory pages that would normally have been swapped out to
disk could make sense on a swapless machine. (This could be an interesting kernel project.)