[Xquartz-dev] Xcomposite extension in XQuartz

[Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia]

There was some work done as part of a PSU Capstone course a few years ago (http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2012/XDC2012AbstractJessVanDerwalker), but development stalled and it's not feature complete yet.

If you want to pick that up where it left off, I'd be happy to answer questions, review code changes, and point you in the right directions.

--Jeremy


> On Mar 31, 2016, at 19:03, John D. Duncan, III <duncanjdiii at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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