What about remote X? [LWN.net]

What about remote X?

Posted Nov 4, 2011 23:39 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
In reply to: What about remote X? by wtogami
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Err, what on earth X server are you using that doesn't support Composite? It's been enabled by default on every single X.Org server since 2004.

You might be referring to the lack of hardware acceleration for common Composite operations (e.g. accelerated Render, or in particular an accelerated zero-copy GL texture-from-pixmap path), but that's exactly what this post was about: enabling a fast software path for (eventually) zero-copy TFP.

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What about remote X?

Posted Nov 5, 2011 0:11 UTC (Sat) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link] (1 responses)

Geode and VIA were the most common thin client video chipsets for many years. They were never capable of hardware accelerated composite needed by compiz.

What about remote X?

Posted Nov 5, 2011 0:19 UTC (Sat) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

OK, so you're referring to hardware acceleration for OpenGL. Composite does not require GL: all the first compositing managers were built using only XRender. So the issue is Compiz's reliance on OpenGL, nothing to do with the Composite extension.

As I said earlier, the entire point of ajax's work (as you can see by reading the email) is providing a fast and competent software-only OpenGL stack (which we have never had on open systems: Mesa's classic swrast is very correct but also excruciatingly slow) using LLVM, so environments like GNOME Shell and Compiz can use GL without any hardware acceleration.