[Xquartz-dev] fb / rootless crash bugs

[Nathaniel Gray]

On Dec 4, 2007 4:36 PM, Greg Parker <gparker at apple.com> wrote:
> On Dec 4, 2007, at 4:02 PM, Ben Byer wrote:
> > On Dec 3, 2007, at 5:28 PM, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
> >>
> >> Do they involve gutting rootless and using kdrive perchance?  I'm
> >> only half joking...
> >
> > No, but I *swore* I mentioned the analogous 100% serious suggestion
> > from the X.org folks that we gut rootless and use xcomposite.  (I
> > don't know that kdrive solves the problem that we're trying to solve
> > here.)
>
> I took a quick look at Composite. It looks like it was designed to
> work inside a window manager. I'm not sure that makes sense in our
> environment. We could make quartz-wm also in charge of the Mac windows
> via Composite, but that might leave other window managers out in the
> cold. One alternative might be to use the Composite code paths in the
> server, without using the Composite extension directly.

I'm certainly not an expert, but it does seem to me that Composite is
a very promising approach.  It basically turns the X server into a
rendering library for window contents instead of a full desktop window
system.  This is exactly what we want!  Just have it render to the
backing stores of the windows of a Cocoa application -- native window
management for free!  I'm oversimplifying, I'm sure, but it seems like
an attractive option.

As for alternative window managers, well, other window managers are
already out in the cold.  They can't interleave windows with native
windows and generally don't behave naturally on OS X.  But this is not
an either-or thing -- other window managers can use the traditional
code paths while OpenQuartzWM (the shiny new open-source version of
quartz-wm ;^) can use the Composite path.

Another thought worth considering -- should we perhaps be writing a
composite manager *instead* of (or in addition to) a window manager?
Existing window managers are OK at handling X windows, they just don't
know about compositing with the other Aqua windows on the OS X
desktop.  Maybe writing a native compositer could solve that.

Cheers,
-n8

-- 
>>>-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
>>>-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->