A Forest of X Server Changes

We've got about another month left in the X server merge window for 1.17 and I've written a small set of fixes which haven't been reviewed yet for merging. I thought I'd advertise them a bit and see if I couldn't encourage a few of you to take a look and see if they're useful, correct and complete.

All of these are in my personal X server repository:

git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/xserver.git

Cleaning up the X Registry

Branch: registry-fixes

I'll bet most of you don't even know about this code. It serves as a database mapping various X enumerations to strings to aid in diagnostics. For the security extensions, SECURITY and XSELinux, it holds names for all of the request, event and errors in the core protocol and all registered extensions. For X-Resource, it has the names of the registered resource types.

The X registry gets the request, event and error data from a file, "protocol.txt", which is installed in /usr/lib/xorg/protocol.txt on my machine. It gets the resource names as a part of resource type allocation.

So, what's wrong with this? Three basic things:

  1. A simple bug -- protocol.txt is left open while the server runs. This consumes a file descriptor for no good reason.

  2. protocol.txt is read and parsed even if the security extensions aren't available. This wastes time and memory.

  3. The resource names are kept even if X-Resource isn't in use.

The fixes remove the configure options for including the registry code; these functions are only used by the above extensions, so we can tell whether to include the code based solely on whether the extensions are being built.

Getting rid of the TCP listener by default

Branch: listen-fixes

We've had the '-nolisten' option for a while now to disable inbound TCP connections. It's useful for security reasons, but we've never enabled this by default. This patch sequence provides configure options for each of the listen sockets (tcp, unix and local), leaves unix and local enabled by default and disables tcp by default.

A new option, '-listen', is added which allows the user to override the -nolisten defaults in case they actually want to use TCP connections to X.

Glamor bug fixes

branch: glamor-fixes

This branch fixes two bugs:

  1. Scale a large pixmap down to a small pixmap. This happens when you display enormous images in a web page. Iceweasel sends the whole huge image to X and uses Render to scale it to the screen. If the image is larger than a single texture, the X server splits it up into tiles, but the code which tries to perform the merged scale is just broken. Five patches fix this.

  2. Shader-based trapezoids. This code uses area coverage to compute trapezoids. That violates the Render spec, which requires point sampling. Further, the performance of these trapezoids is lower than software (by a lot). This one patch removes the code.

Present bug fixes

branch: present-fixes

A selection of small bug fixes:

  1. Clear pending flips at CloseScreen. This removes a reference to any pending flip pixmap, allowing it to be freed. Otherwise, we'll leak memory across server reset.

  2. Add support for PresentOptionCopy. This has been in the protocol spec for a while, and was completely trivial to implement. However, it never got done. One tiny little patch.

  3. Expose the Present API to drivers via sdksyms.sh. Until now, the present extension APIs have only been available inside the X server. This exposes them to drivers. This took a few cleanup patches first.

Use Present for Glamor XV

branch: glamor-present-xv

Painting XV to the screen should be done at vblank time to avoid tearing. Present offers vblank synchronized operations. Hooking those two together required a few new present APIs to expose the vblank functionality outside of the present code, then a bit of glamor code to hook up that new API to the XV bits.

Switching Glamor to a GL core profile context

branch: glamor-core-profile

This patch set is still in progress, but demonstrates how close we are. We'll be requiring OpenGL 3.3 for this so that we get texture swizzling, which is required for our single channel objects.

The changes present on the branch are:

  1. Switch single channel surfaces from GL_ALPHA to GL_RED.

  2. Use vertex array objects.

  3. Switch ephyr over to using a core 3.3 profile.

Still left to do is

  1. Switch Render code to VBOs

The core code uses VBOs everywhere, but the Render code doesn't. This means that all Render drawing fails, which makes the resulting server not very useful.

My main objective for getting this done is to reduce memory usage by about 16MB, which is the space allocated for software rendering in Mesa in case someone does something which the hardware doesn't handle, and that can only with some legacy OpenGL APIs.

Please help out!

All of these friendly little patches are looking for a bit of review so that they can get merged before the 1.17 window closes.