On Sun, Oct 20, 2002 at 05:09:08PM -0600, Jens Owen wrote:
> Ian Romanick wrote:
> > Warning: ignorant questions on the way...
> > 
> > I've gotten some questions from a couple of people about backing store with
> > DRI, on the R100 driver specifically.  Because my background isn't firmly
> > rooted in X-Windows, I wasn't really familiar with what that meant. :)  I
> > did a little searching, and I think I have a vauge idea now.
> > 
> > In any case, as near as I can tell, when the Radeon DRI driver gets loaded,
> > backing store is explicitly disabled.  Why is that?  Is it a hardware
> > limitation or is it "just" to conserve memory?  Something else?
> 
> Ian,
> 
> Sorry about the late response.  I hope this is still useful.
> 
> Backing Store is a "feature" in X that allows the contents of windows to 
> be preserved even when they are obscured.  The benefit of this feature 
> is the application should not receive expose events from the server when 
> a window is uncovered.  However, the implementation of backingstore 
> within the X Server puts the burden on the drivers to render to both the 
> exposed areas on the screen *and* to the saved areas of backing store 
> which I belive are implemented as a pixmap...which can reside in 
> offscreen memory or the X Server's system allocated memory.

Okay, that's pretty much what I thought it did.  There was a similar feature
in the Amiga windowing system back in the day, but I won't go there. :)

> Making a direct rendering 3D driver render to a windows backing store 
> area is a complicated task with very little benefit, IMO.

Right, but shouldn't purely 2D targets work?  I wouldn't think that the
menus in twm are using OpenGL. :)  At the very least, if it's not supported
at all, when X is started with +bs, shouldn't it say just say no?  That's
the problem that I see.  The user requests a feature, X says it's okay, but
then it's not implemented.

-- 
Smile!  http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990315.html
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