Hello all. I was wondering if there is any word on the status of getting
the COMPOSITE extension built into XQuartz? I personally use a bunch of
UNIX-y GUI programs and dockapps (some of them quite old). I've found
that, when doing graphically intensive actions (such as quickly
scrolling in a unicode-rxvt term, forwarding my SSH session to XQuartz
to write LaTeX/use eclipse from our campus workstation computers/submit
moodle assignments in firefox), that there is quite a good deal of
graphical sluggishness. CPU use does not spike much, so I am assuming
that this is a flaw of the X server rendering itself (or perhaps the OS
X drivers?).
I have somewhat superficial knowledge of the COMPOSITE extension, but I
was under the impression that X11 compositors (such as compton) get
around this issue by using open-gl/randr rendering as their graphical
back-end (among many other hacks).
It seems that programs which do use open-gl rendering are unaffected by
the sluggishness caused by my dockapss (glxgears, for example).
I was also under the impression that most modern UNIX-y Desktop
Environments (such as Gnome, KDE, etc.) come with compositors built in
(for eye-candy such as v-synch, drop shadows, smooth scrolling, etc.).
It seems like adding COMPOSITE extension support could potentially bring
over users from other operating systems (especially with the wonderful
pkg-src development from Jonathan Perkin at joyent) that could further
help re-vitalize the OS X open-source community.
I know that, normally, to enable the composite extension in X11 you
would just add:
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
to your xorg.conf file. As we know, XQuartz uses a different system
where all of the X server extensions are always started on launch
(xrandr, etc.)
Am I missing something, or is XQuartz still being built without the
COMPOSITE extension enabled? I remember reading archives from the past
that explained how builds would fail while trying to compile with
COMPOSITE support [1]. That was years ago, and I thought there was a
modern XQuartz branch that supported the extension..[0]
Here are some (bad examples) of the issue that I am talking about:
http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/XQuartz.webm
http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/XQuartz-glx.webm
Notice how, especially in the second screencast, extreme scrolling in
the urxvt buffer causes the dockapps to hang, while the glxgears program
chugs along at a smooth 60fps. I was hoping that enabling the COMPOSITE
extension and using a compositor such as compton could alleviate such
issues in the future.
Let me apologize in advanced if I have interpreted this issue completely
incorrectly; I am no X11 expert.
[0]:
https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/xquartz-changes/2011-May/001054.html
[1]: http://lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2011/Feb/msg00013.html
- John D.
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