An anonymous reader writes "In a curious contrast to conventional wisdom, there are reports of X11 Chromium being faster than Windows or Mac versions. In the thread titled 'Why is Linux Chrome so fast?,' a developer speculates that it is due to the use of X11 capabilities: 'On X-windows [sic], the renderer backingstores are managed by the X server, and the transport DIBs are also managed by the X server. So, we avoid a lot of memcpy costs incurred on Windows due to keeping the backingstores in main memory there.' Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday November 03, @08:59AM (#29962820)
"Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
Yes of course it has. X11 is great and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't understand it properly, or have an accurate idea of what it's genuine problems are actually due to.
Because, from a user's perspective, it doesn't work all that well. Here's an example:
On MacOS X, it's just about impossible to get into a situation where a) video tears or flickers, or b) menus and windows can "rub out" other menus or windows (eg, you can't drag a window around like a giant eraser on Mac OS). On X+whatever, it's pathetically easy to do either. Windows is somewhere in-between the two.
To be fair to X, managing compositing et al isn't it's job---but it should be! Between X's by-design paucity of features and the number of combinations of video driver, X server, window manager and settings thereof, it's hard to get a decent, modern desktop experience. Had X been designed a little more smartly (eg, for actual people and not for computer scientists) this probably wouldn't be such a problem. Grafting things like multiple display support, accelerated 3D, video playback and now, compositing, have shown problems. Back in the day, when you could just buy IRIX (ro whatever) and be assured of a working, end-to-end X implementation this wasn't an issue. With the clusterfuck that is X.org+DRM+GEM+Mesa+KMS+GL/GLX/AIGLX+DRI/DRI2+UXA/EXA/XAA+whatever window manager is invovled, it's a crapshoot.
By comparison, again, we have MacOS X's system, which again just works, even if in theoretical terms it's a little slower. Users don't care that much about GTK benchmarks; they do care if the user experience breaks down.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X [art.net]. It's worth reading if you're wondering why X drives people nuts.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X. It's worth reading if you're wondering why X drives people nuts.
The handbook may be out of date, but that section on X is just as true today as it was then. This part in particular hits the nail on the head:
(The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.)
If X outperforms anything, it is by sheer luck and unexpected consequence. The planets align "just so" and for once it is the best implimentation for a particular task. It is not a common occurance. Coming to the conclusion that it "stood the test of time" based on a single piece of software is rather foolish. If X regularly out-performed Windows and Mac this would not be a surprise, but of course, it is a surprise.
, and it has a client server model because originally the display was normally on a different machine than the server (this is often raised as a bad design)
You should read that section on X the GP posted, they actually tried to use X for its intended purpose (back when that actually was an intended purpose, and had not been hacked around yet) and found it nearly useless as a remote display server/client setup compared to other setups, most notably Sun's at the time. It was arbitrarily devided into client/server (and "client" and "server" roles were reversed from convention, for some strange reason) without much rhyme or reason, which made it a bandwidth hog and meant half the graphics application had to reside on the client (the end computer the graphics, not X's retarded definition of client) anyway.
...it was optimised to be as fast as possible within the design limitations it had
Except that it wasn't. For the longest time X11 was the most bloated and slowest option out there, for remote and local applications alike. The only reason it is fast now is because hardware has moved so far beyond it that it is fast in spite of itself. It certainly isn't nearly as powerful as any other GUI system, and when you actually add on all the bells and whistles (which must be created separately by somebody else) it's still slower than anything around. Seriously, add the necessary components to make X11 match Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OSX, particularly a good window manager window dressing from Compiz, and you'll find almost everything GUI-based runs slower on X11.
That Chrome is an exception is shocking, and is why everybody is surprised, hence TFA.
(and "client" and "server" roles were reversed from convention, for some strange reason)
What? Since when? I always thought that the X server was the behemoth application that ran, waiting for connections from other apps (the clients), consolidated the requests, acted on them, and responded back to those clients. You're telling me that X itself is termed the client, and those little apps that all connect to it are called servers? Yeah, that IS backwards!
Oh, hold it, that's not what you're saying at all. You think that "server" is a designation of the size of the machine it runs on, not a designation of the model of communication the application itself uses. You do realise, though, that even a "web server" (which could just be a wall wart [slashdot.org] acts as a client for DNS querying, right? That "client" and "server" are fluid terms based on what the app is doing, and not where it is?
A server responds to incoming request(s), usually from multiple sources. A client initiates those request(s), usually to a single target. That is all. X uses these terms perfectly. The application sitting on my desktop machine is the server, and the xterm I'm running on the Linux/zSeries box is the client. For this particular purpose. Of course, that Linux/zSeries box is also the ssh server that I use to connect to it in the first place, over which a tunnel is created in the reverse direction to allow that xterm to come up at all. It's not the convention that is being ignored. It's just that you're using the wrong definition.
To me a the server is the machine running the application that provide me with a service.
Good. Then you understand that the X server provides you with a graphical environment which is utilized by client applications on the (possibly remote) machine which executes them?
Whether the direction of who open a socket first matters to define which machine is the actual server is up for debate.
Erm, no. That isn't what defines whether something is a server or not.
A server (or "service" if you like . . . oh just call it a daemon) -- waits for incoming connections and . . . well, it services them.
You simply cannot say that about applications which are running on a machine which may have no display of its own.
Tell you what. If you don't understand CS terminology and can't apply it, don't use it. Call your X server "the display" and the client applications which it services "applications".
With cloud computing and faster bandwidth, you're only going to get more confused.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday November 03, @12:38PM (#29965654)
Let's just say you're wrong and I've seen flickering on plenty of Mac OS desktops.
And with X11, the flickering you get is more likely due to the program ignoring X backing store and "doing their own thang". Well guess: their failure isn't the fault of X11, is it.
"To be fair to X, managing compositing et al isn't it's job---but it should be!"
Compiz: It IS!!!
Sheesh.
And Enlightenment had compositing freaking YEARS ago.
" Between X's by-design paucity of features"
You mean like C's "paucity of features" that means libraries that do whatever you damn well want?
There is no "by-design paucity": by design X11 is extensible. See X extensions.
"Had X been designed a little more smartly (eg, for actual people and not for computer scientists) this probably wouldn't be such a problem."
Uh, what design WOULD have been for "actual people"? This statement, bald as it is, makes no sense.
X11 is designed for the task it has to solve: drawing a GUI.
One program: one purpose. Expose capability and don't impose process: someone may think of a use you never considered when writing it, so don' t write a program that will hate them for it.
The UNIX way.
Which, oddly enough, Apple have embraced to a large extent since bringing out Ten.
"By comparison, again, we have MacOS X's system, which again just works, even if in theoretical terms it's a little slower."
Two problems: the dissing of X is how slow it is. So Ten's system being slower should be more dissed, yes?
Secondly, ten's system doesn't just works else there would be no problem with "But Mac can't support clones, they have to have a limited selected hardware to deliver the eXPerience!". Ignoring that this just works meme is wrong. I've seen it often just stop a lot.
"The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X "
And here we see where you've been misled.
The UNIX paradigm is extensibility. Policy is set by the use of the program. not by its programming. And the UNIX haters hate UNIX so hate the UNIX paradigm. Ergo they hate X too.
Maybe they're just a little bit predisposed to a priori conclusions...
And it's not the "why does X drive people nuts" it's why do people get a stiffy when the opportunity comes to diss X?
(oh, and a quick look at that, hmm, *discourse* seems to be a person who gets a real big boner over getting to rant and rave about how X is teh devil. Could he be any less coherent?)
When applications become too unresponsive to update under a compositing system their windows stay frozen, but do not get "erased" by dragging another window over them. Ever.
I'm dragging a Firefox window over a dead RDP session right now. It's erasing the contents of the window. I've never, ever managed to do that on MacOS X and not often on Windows Vista.
If I use a compositing window manager, that problem goes away, but in it's place comes a whole new set of issues. Ever notice how common "turn off Compiz/KWin compositing" comes up when people try to troubleshoot X issues? At least Vista is smart enough to turn it off for you when the situation merits it.
"Tearing" of Windows during dragging is still a problem for all of these systems if somewhere along the line there's enough of a difference between refresh rates between devices and/or software.
On no other platform do you ever have to think about syncing refresh rates. On X, you're at the mercy of the driver and window manager. On an nVidia card you're probably ok. On a recent Intel card you might be. On ATI it's a complete crapshoot. Throw in compositing and it gets even more complex.
Meanwhile, on much of the same hardware, you could run a hacked version of Mac OS X and not see a lick of tearing or artifacting.
I'm really not sure what day you were back in where dragging windows around in Irix didn't result in slow redraws over busy applications, I suspect that whatever it is you're smoking might have some fungus growing on it. Might be time to refresh your stash.
I'm not saying that IRIX didn't do have that problem, but that, at the time, you could buy a commercial UNIX workstation and get a decently-integrated X server. The problem then was that you had to pay an astronomical sum to get the same window management performance that you took for granted on a Mac, and that a heck of a lot of tuning, testing and integration had to happen to get your (very expensive) video or 3D application to work, again, as well as a Mac.
Nowadays, you don't have to spend a fortune tog get decent X. What you have instead is that you're stuck with one card family (nVidia) or checking experimental code out of various git respositories, and even then you're not guaranteed the level of seamless video behaviour that you'd see on a Intel-based machine running Windows Vista.
I'm glad some people get decent X performance, but spending more than a little time on, say, Phoronix or Ubuntu's forums should disabuse you of the notion that everything works.
I'm dragging a Firefox window over a dead RDP session right now. It's erasing the contents of the window. I've never, ever managed to do that on MacOS X and not often on Windows Vista.
For RDP that makes sense- compositing doesn't happen over Terminal Services. What normally happens on Windows, is that when the Window Manager (not Aero) detects that an application has stopped responding to WM_PAINT messages, it actually swaps out the window for a special one that looks just like the last known good copy of the windows display surface. If it can't for some reason, it just dumps a plain white window with loading cursor instead.
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
To be fair I think the gp meant Linux exclusive, not native. But even then Firefox is a pretty bad choice, since its development has always had Linux in mind as well as other platforms.
If you benchmark some random 3D games between Linux and Windows there is no Linux slow-down. If you benchmark the responsiveness of a well written GUI environment on Linux vs Windows, there's no slow-down. In fact, I've only rarely run into a situation where Linux is slower than Windows in a GUI or otherwise. The primary reason I've come to realize is lazy programmers writing slow client software, and in some cases, horribly inefficient GUI toolkits (Gtk, I'm looking at you).
X11 isn't the bottleneck, and ever since a few tweaks were done for desktop users, the Linux kernel isn't either.
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
Yes, exactly. X11 ran reasonably complicated applications 20 years ago on hardware that we throw out as woefully inadequate (or quaintly archaic) today, and did so with entirely acceptable speed. X11 isn't the problem -- hardware is what, two orders of magnitude faster now? -- it's all of the poor programming practices that have layer upon layer of abstraction and interpretation stacked tall and high.
I had a 266 MHz laptop in the mid 1990s (about 15 years ago) that ran Linux (RedHat 6.2, mostly) and X11 perfectly well with a mere 64 MB of main memory. A while ago, I tried to load a Fedora release (9, if I recall correctly) on it. "Laughable" is a good term to describe the result. My current laptop has a 10x faster processor and 50x more memory. There's more cache on the processor in my new laptop than total system memory on the old one --- And yet, Fedora 11 feels sluggish on the new hardware. X11 is not the problem.
The problem is that when monitoring processes, people can "see" X11 using CPU cycles, whereas in Windows they only "see" the application doing. It's six of one, half dozen of the other -- but it makes it look like X11 is CPU-resource intensive. In reality, the same cycles are used for windows based apps (perhaps more? I certainly don't know...), but they look like the app using the CPU which is somehow more expected.
memcpy of 1000s of bytes is slower than sending a message. Many of these systems that provide direct access to RAM require lots of copying too. (OSX one example I'm most familiar with)
X11 also supports direct access to memory, but it is only used in very specific circumstances because it's extra work to set up.
I've never had performance issues running X11 over a LAN. VNC, on the other hand, is noticeably sluggish (RDP seems to work well though). I don't run apps over a WAN very often, except for the occasional emacs session (which is a bit laggy but useable).
But more importantly, the X style of remote access is much, much more useful than VNC/RDP. Remote apps integrate seamlessly into my desktop, instead of being stuck in a separate window. And multiple people can run remote apps on the same machine, without interfering with each other or a user who's physically sitting at the machine.
VNC and RDP are useful hacks for systems that weren't designed for remote access, but they're no replacement for real network transparency.
VNC and RDP give you the ability to interact in an explicitly remote sense, the windows in question operate on the remote server instance and will remain in existence regardless of what happens to the local system.
That's one reason I stopped using X11 forwarding even though I could: If I lost connection on my laptop for any reason, every application I had open was dead. With VNC (or RDP), they were always running remotely.
Also, if I have an application open on display:0 I have no way (that I know) of moving it from:0 to:10 and having it appear uninterrupted on my local display.
I'd say that they're extremely useful hacks that solve issues that are, at least for me, unresolved in X11.
I've never had performance issues running X11 over a LAN.
VNC and RDP are useful hacks for systems that weren't designed for remote access, but they're no replacement for real network transparency.
Oh no you don't!
Try using X11 over something slightly slower as LAN. Just try it, over ADSL, whatever
I tried. And X11 is totally and utterly USELESS. A well configured VNC (and you have to really play with the knobs) is usable. RDP is the best (of course, it wasn't developed by Microsoft...)
If VNC is usable, you'll love NX [nomachine.com]. It is *far* more responsive for a given bandwidth/latency and it is persistent too (the session keeps running if your client disconnects.).
You can even run VNC to other machines through NX and it feels faster on limited bandwidth (NX creates a session on the Linux client that runs a fullscreen vncviewer to another system.)
It's my standard way of working remotely. My default work desktop lives on a Linux machine at the office and it resizes automatically depending on what screen size the client uses (as long as your Gnome or KDE version is recent.) Even at the office I run NX to my work session - over a LAN I can't tell the difference between local and NX.
The thing is, X11 gets network-transparency essentially for free. The system requires some sort of inter-process communication, even when running on a local machine, and Unix-domain sockets are one of the fastest IPC mechanisms available short of shared memory (which is orders of magnitude harder to get right). X11 supports shared memory for local processes, to speed up communication of large objects like pixmaps, but the core protocol is socket-based and there is absolutely no reason to change that. So long as this is the case, why not support network transparency? BSD network sockets are interchangeable with Unix-domain local sockets once the connection has been established, so it's not like there's much more effort involved.
From the later discussion on that topic, it seems the conclusion was that windows had a large history in the profile and may be bitblt'ing the first draw operation from main memory. Both of which have an impact on how slow it feels to the user.
After doing a fresh install on both systems the guy determined that it was just some sort of freak occurrence. He had one laptop with a 2.0ghz processor and another with a 2.4ghz processor and after the reinstall on both systems, VOILA...it was only roughly a 20% difference...
TFA - just keep reading further and further down the usenet post
If you choose your abstraction carefully, you can hide expensive details from user space.
In the short term it may not gain you anything.
But if the abstraction lives and thrives, then much can go on behind the scenes to improve the situation.
Java is another example of this: they carefully designed the language so that it would be possible to make vast simplifiying assumptions and implement optimizations that really improve performance without impacting the "other side" of the wall. Originally java was slow, but hard work behind the scenes means that your java programs run much faster now, without any extra effort on the part of the application developer.
X Windows is a great example of this. Originally we had dumb frame buffers with no acceleration at all. And yet X provides an abstraction that allows lots and lots of hardware optimizations to take place.
The Windows and OSX abstractions for the display don't provide an API that allows these sorts of optimizations to be done behind the scenes. We have incredible display hardware with awesome features that go unused in these environments because the display abstractions do not allow for them.
X itself is undergoing incredible levels of development and improvement. Way back when, "The Open Group" tried to say that X was "complete" with X11R6, and no more development was needed, though somehow defects and omissions let numbers start creeping in after the decimal point. IIRC it got to somewhere in the X11R6.3-X11R6.5 range. Then XFree86 took over, ramping up some innovation, though still slower than many liked. After that X.Org took over, decided it was high time for X11R7, (They did X11R6.9 as a stage to get there.) and things started moving faster.
At this point, they're redrawing the lines (KMS, DRI/DRI2, DRM) between kernel and user space to (hopefully) get a better balance speed and stability/security. They've pretty much reworked the 2D acceleration (*XA) and are reworking the 3D acceleration (Gallium3D) which will also simplify driver development. The inteface has been reworked down near the protocol level (xcb) to improve speed and memory usage. One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
The next 6-12 months will be very interesting for X-Windows, but then again, the past few years have been interesting, too.
I'm not talking about the stuff that is exposed. I'm talking about the things that are NOT exposed. X11 runs great over the network because of all the things that they chose to NOT allow the user to do.
Sure you can accelerate bit-blitting, that is really old school.
Take a look at the fundamental model. When you move a window in Windows, the app is notified and it has to respond. Try moving the window of an unresponsive app, it does not redraw because Windows is asking the app to redraw it. When you move the window of an unresponsive app in X, the window redraws because X already knows what it needs to know about redrawing the window without having to make a trip back to the application.
Those are the kinds of things that you DON'T expose. That way the driver and hardware are free to implement them as they see fit.
No X11 can do Windows 7 and Vista and OSX expose features... and does so.....
The whole point is that X11 does not draw Windows it draws tiles... Window Managers draw windows... and they can draw 3d glass dancing Windows on X11 without X11 caring about it...
On Windows the layers are Driver - GDI - Application On X11 the layers are Driver - Kernel - X11 - Window Manager - Application (there may be more...)
The point is that you do not need to Expose the low level stuff to the application... just to the window manager, the application should not have to worry about redrawing itself, or resizing the window etc... it should let the window manager worry about that
X11 would have a hard time trying to do the Windows 7 alt-tab or OS X expose features where Windows move around in 3-dimensions on the screen. X11 doesn't expose that kind of stuff.
Uhhhh... have you seen Compiz, Beryl, Metisse, Gnome-Shell or any of the other whiz-bang screen-flipping and warping and cubing desktops? They do run X11 apps... through an X11 extension, be it AIGLX or XGL or something similar. X11 exposes whatever you want through the use of extensions, including the stuff needed to do 3D window manipulation. It did this when Vista was still Longhorn, let alone Windows come lately annex 7...
I'm pretty sure that the biggest slowdown for Chrome isn't the memcpy/bitblitting for the display - it's probably something to do with the insanely big history files it generates as part of it's searchable history.
Files you can't limit in size, can't compress, can't optimise. Instead all you can do is to delete them and loose all your precious history information. It also has the bonus of providing a searchable address bar that performs significantly worse than firefox's searchable address bar !
I use both firefox and chrome simultaneously at home and at work, dedicated each browser for different tasks I do. It's a real shame that Chrome is being seriously degraded over time by this fault - I've started switching back to firefox because of it as my laptop just struggles too much with it now...
X11 is not bloated nor slow, GTK is both. Put 100 or so spinedits on one form in Win32 and in GTK. On netbook or anything other than quadcore machine, you will see significant difference in speed. And it is not because of the graphics. Sometimes I think GTK render fractals somewhere just to keep processor busy. Meanwhile, when I draw 100 spinedits using only cairo, it is almost as fast as Win32 while giving the same output as GTK including shadows, gradients, etc... I've being noticing this GTK behavior since forever.
"For whatever reason, Linux drivers have NEVER taken advantage of this, and that is why Linux often looks clunky compared to Windows on the same hardware."
This is just BLATANTLY WRONG.
All you need to do is read the feature announcements for the nVidia and ATI display drivers, which you apparently DON'T DO.
nVidia's REAL target market is the folks who work at animation companies, and the hard-core data visualization people. Their products are designed to fly in THIS environment. This market is VERY HEAVILY tilted toward Unix. That is WHY you can get such EXCELLENT display support under Linux. The rest of us are just piggybacking off of this.
How about a Qt build of Chromium as opposed to a GTK build of Chromium? I'd be real curious to see how it performs.
I was also saddened to see the port team bitch and complain initially that they had to use GTK, because GTK is "the standard toolkit" for Linux, while in the same paragraph complaining that Linux doesn't simply have one standard toolkit. Last time I checked, Windows has a bevy of toolkits and APIs to choose from as well. They also complained that writing audio in Linux was difficult.
If they had written a Qt app from day one, porting would be minimal, they wouldn't have to maintain this huge separate trunks, it would have worked from day 1 on Solaris, Mac, Linux, Windows, BSD, etc. Audio would have been very easy to code with Phonon.
I'm curious to see if Chrome (the browser and OS) are indeed both developed with GTK, then will they both need some retrofits when GTK 3.0 ships, further complicating the matter?
Windows does not have a bevy of toolkits to choose from out of the box.
Yet Windows developers often find the core Win32 API doesn't fit their needs, and waffle between toolkits like GTK, wxWidgets, Qt, and the usual cross-platform suspects. They also turn to.NET, Java (technically a whole language), MFC and others.
I constantly run into issues where I need to download a runtime to run a Windows app, because many developers don't simply develop for what is out of the box with a standard Windows install.
I've seen native X11 apps offer up checkboxes, form elements, and the like. So it is possible. It just doesn't look nice.
Developing audio on Windows is not necessarily standard, not easy. That is why apps might ship with their own separate audio library like OpenAL, tie into QuickTime, etc.
I have some non-trivial Windows apps that were built for Win95 that still run in Windows7.
Sadly, there were many Windows 95 era apps that were still 16 bit, which don't work in x64 versions of Windows 7. Half of my games (mostly from the XP era, not Win95 era) wouldn't work properly in Windows 7. Windows breaks compatibility all the time, even with service packs. Saying you have a particular app that still works doesn't mean the Win32 API has stayed the same, because it hasn't.
The GTK API has stayed mostly the same over the 2.x life-cycle. That is likely to change with GTK 3.
Now, I'm not a fan of GTK by any means. However, the GTK 2.x API has been around since 2002. Anything written for that API should still work fine today.
If they wanted the easy way out, they would have used wxWidgets, which at least feels native (by using the native toolkits) across Windows and Mac, and GTK on other Unixes.
That is basically what I said, except you apparently didn't get that. I suggested they use Qt (like wxWidgets is a cross-platform toolkit). Qt makes more sense for a variety of reasons, such as native bindings to Webkit (the heart of Chrome), and very easy audio development where you write code once, and then the audio works on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
Explorer is a cross between your shell and your window manager, its like the Gnome or KDE window managers except most of the window manager functions are the responsibility of process itself in Windows, although they are provided by the standard libraries, which us things like the uxtheme.dll and company to provide a consistent interface until the app goes well out of its way to do otherwise. You can use cmd.exe in place of explorer and apps won't notice the difference unless they interact with explorer, such as things that put items in the notification area (systray to most). Apps do not talk to explorer to display windows any more than apps on Linux talk to Gnome or KDE, or Finder on OS X. None of them have to be installed or work in order for Windows to be displayed. You can kill all explorer.exe processes in windows and you just won't have a start menu or clickable desktop until it restarts. You can not kill the X11 client and do the same, all processes using it will be disconnected and exit or crash.
Quartz is a toolkit/API used within the 'window_server', like DirectX to some extent on Windows. It is not the generic low level API like GDI is on Windows.
'window_server' would be almost the direct equivalent of X11 on OS X in native applications, if you exclude X11 for OS X, which acts as a translator basically between X11 servers (applications) and your X11 client (the gui you see) and passes that along to the window_server process to display.
In reality, all three of these systems use a different mix of the way these components interact and at which layer things are done due to their different designs. There isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between any of the components.
I do not recall which process on Windows handles the GUI, but it is more or less untouchable, unlike in OS X and traditional UNIX where you can easily kill the gui portion, doing so in Windows traditionally would result in a blue screen, this is no longer strictly true in the Windows 6.x versions (Win2k8/Vista/Win7), but I don't recall what process owns that part of the system off the top of my head.
I guess maybe I'm making bad assumptions, as I don't really know what Chrome's intent with multiple processes is... but I think the answer to your question is no, it wouldn't necessarily impact security and certainly wouldn't fully negate the multi-process approach's advantages.
The major advantage to keeping separate tasks in separate processes, it seems to me, is that they have separate memory spaces. I can't sneakily inject code into another task's buffers if I'm not in the same process. In particular, if the browser spawns a process to execute some plug-in or whatever, there's less risk that the plug-in or whatever can trick the browser into executing malicious code. (Or cause it to crash, but that's more "stability" than "security".)
In other words, the biggest security risk comes from two processes sharing the same process at the same time. I don't think re-use is as big a problem. Sure, if you did a bad job of wiping buffers, then in theory one process could see its predicessor's data; and I guess there are scenarios where that could be an issue, though I'm a little skeptical that a malicious process would go rooting around its uninitialized space "just in case" it was handed a process with something it would recognize as sensitive data from a previous task...
Test of time (Score:4, Funny)
"Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
Yes of course it has. X11 is great and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't understand it properly, or have an accurate idea of what it's genuine problems are actually due to.
Re:Test of time (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this modded funny?
Parent
Re:Test of time (Score:4, Funny)
Forget about the gp, why is THIS modded funny?
Parent
Re:Test of time (Score:4, Funny)
And God forbid that I continue the joke and say, "Why is /THIS/ modded funny!?"
Parent
Re:Test of time (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Test of time (Score:4, Funny)
you guys are hilarious.
Why isn't this modded redundant?
Parent
So in other words (Score:3, Interesting)
So in other words, those who programmed on X when X was the only big player are now older where you lose hair and sexual virility.
Colour me surprised.
Meanwhile X is still working better than Mac or Windows as a GUI framework.
Thing I don't get is why so many guys have a hard-on for dissing X.
Why?
Re:So in other words (Score:5, Interesting)
Because, from a user's perspective, it doesn't work all that well. Here's an example:
On MacOS X, it's just about impossible to get into a situation where a) video tears or flickers, or b) menus and windows can "rub out" other menus or windows (eg, you can't drag a window around like a giant eraser on Mac OS). On X+whatever, it's pathetically easy to do either. Windows is somewhere in-between the two.
To be fair to X, managing compositing et al isn't it's job---but it should be! Between X's by-design paucity of features and the number of combinations of video driver, X server, window manager and settings thereof, it's hard to get a decent, modern desktop experience. Had X been designed a little more smartly (eg, for actual people and not for computer scientists) this probably wouldn't be such a problem. Grafting things like multiple display support, accelerated 3D, video playback and now, compositing, have shown problems. Back in the day, when you could just buy IRIX (ro whatever) and be assured of a working, end-to-end X implementation this wasn't an issue. With the clusterfuck that is X.org+DRM+GEM+Mesa+KMS+GL/GLX/AIGLX+DRI/DRI2+UXA/EXA/XAA+whatever window manager is invovled, it's a crapshoot.
By comparison, again, we have MacOS X's system, which again just works, even if in theoretical terms it's a little slower. Users don't care that much about GTK benchmarks; they do care if the user experience breaks down.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X [art.net]. It's worth reading if you're wondering why X drives people nuts.
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Re:So in other words (Score:5, Insightful)
The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X. It's worth reading if you're wondering why X drives people nuts.
The handbook may be out of date, but that section on X is just as true today as it was then. This part in particular hits the nail on the head:
(The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.)
If X outperforms anything, it is by sheer luck and unexpected consequence. The planets align "just so" and for once it is the best implimentation for a particular task. It is not a common occurance. Coming to the conclusion that it "stood the test of time" based on a single piece of software is rather foolish. If X regularly out-performed Windows and Mac this would not be a surprise, but of course, it is a surprise.
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Re:So in other words (Score:5, Insightful)
, and it has a client server model because originally the display was normally on a different machine than the server (this is often raised as a bad design)
You should read that section on X the GP posted, they actually tried to use X for its intended purpose (back when that actually was an intended purpose, and had not been hacked around yet) and found it nearly useless as a remote display server/client setup compared to other setups, most notably Sun's at the time. It was arbitrarily devided into client/server (and "client" and "server" roles were reversed from convention, for some strange reason) without much rhyme or reason, which made it a bandwidth hog and meant half the graphics application had to reside on the client (the end computer the graphics, not X's retarded definition of client) anyway.
Except that it wasn't. For the longest time X11 was the most bloated and slowest option out there, for remote and local applications alike. The only reason it is fast now is because hardware has moved so far beyond it that it is fast in spite of itself. It certainly isn't nearly as powerful as any other GUI system, and when you actually add on all the bells and whistles (which must be created separately by somebody else) it's still slower than anything around. Seriously, add the necessary components to make X11 match Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OSX, particularly a good window manager window dressing from Compiz, and you'll find almost everything GUI-based runs slower on X11.
That Chrome is an exception is shocking, and is why everybody is surprised, hence TFA.
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Re:So in other words (Score:5, Informative)
(and "client" and "server" roles were reversed from convention, for some strange reason)
What? Since when? I always thought that the X server was the behemoth application that ran, waiting for connections from other apps (the clients), consolidated the requests, acted on them, and responded back to those clients. You're telling me that X itself is termed the client, and those little apps that all connect to it are called servers? Yeah, that IS backwards!
Oh, hold it, that's not what you're saying at all. You think that "server" is a designation of the size of the machine it runs on, not a designation of the model of communication the application itself uses. You do realise, though, that even a "web server" (which could just be a wall wart [slashdot.org] acts as a client for DNS querying, right? That "client" and "server" are fluid terms based on what the app is doing, and not where it is?
A server responds to incoming request(s), usually from multiple sources. A client initiates those request(s), usually to a single target. That is all. X uses these terms perfectly. The application sitting on my desktop machine is the server, and the xterm I'm running on the Linux/zSeries box is the client. For this particular purpose. Of course, that Linux/zSeries box is also the ssh server that I use to connect to it in the first place, over which a tunnel is created in the reverse direction to allow that xterm to come up at all. It's not the convention that is being ignored. It's just that you're using the wrong definition.
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Re:So in other words (Score:4, Informative)
To me a the server is the machine running the application that provide me with a service.
Good. Then you understand that the X server provides you with a graphical environment which is utilized by client applications on the (possibly remote) machine which executes them?
Whether the direction of who open a socket first matters to define which machine is the actual server is up for debate.
Erm, no. That isn't what defines whether something is a server or not.
A server (or "service" if you like . . . oh just call it a daemon) -- waits for incoming connections and . . . well, it services them.
You simply cannot say that about applications which are running on a machine which may have no display of its own.
Tell you what. If you don't understand CS terminology and can't apply it, don't use it. Call your X server "the display" and the client applications which it services "applications".
With cloud computing and faster bandwidth, you're only going to get more confused.
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Oh dear. So wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Let's just say you're wrong and I've seen flickering on plenty of Mac OS desktops.
And with X11, the flickering you get is more likely due to the program ignoring X backing store and "doing their own thang". Well guess: their failure isn't the fault of X11, is it.
"To be fair to X, managing compositing et al isn't it's job---but it should be!"
Compiz: It IS!!!
Sheesh.
And Enlightenment had compositing freaking YEARS ago.
" Between X's by-design paucity of features"
You mean like C's "paucity of features" that means libraries that do whatever you damn well want?
There is no "by-design paucity": by design X11 is extensible. See X extensions.
"Had X been designed a little more smartly (eg, for actual people and not for computer scientists) this probably wouldn't be such a problem."
Uh, what design WOULD have been for "actual people"? This statement, bald as it is, makes no sense.
X11 is designed for the task it has to solve: drawing a GUI.
One program: one purpose. Expose capability and don't impose process: someone may think of a use you never considered when writing it, so don' t write a program that will hate them for it.
The UNIX way.
Which, oddly enough, Apple have embraced to a large extent since bringing out Ten.
"By comparison, again, we have MacOS X's system, which again just works, even if in theoretical terms it's a little slower."
Two problems: the dissing of X is how slow it is. So Ten's system being slower should be more dissed, yes?
Secondly, ten's system doesn't just works else there would be no problem with "But Mac can't support clones, they have to have a limited selected hardware to deliver the eXPerience!". Ignoring that this just works meme is wrong. I've seen it often just stop a lot.
"The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X "
And here we see where you've been misled.
The UNIX paradigm is extensibility. Policy is set by the use of the program. not by its programming. And the UNIX haters hate UNIX so hate the UNIX paradigm. Ergo they hate X too.
Maybe they're just a little bit predisposed to a priori conclusions...
And it's not the "why does X drive people nuts" it's why do people get a stiffy when the opportunity comes to diss X?
(oh, and a quick look at that, hmm, *discourse* seems to be a person who gets a real big boner over getting to rant and rave about how X is teh devil. Could he be any less coherent?)
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Re:So in other words (Score:4, Informative)
I'm dragging a Firefox window over a dead RDP session right now. It's erasing the contents of the window. I've never, ever managed to do that on MacOS X and not often on Windows Vista.
If I use a compositing window manager, that problem goes away, but in it's place comes a whole new set of issues. Ever notice how common "turn off Compiz/KWin compositing" comes up when people try to troubleshoot X issues? At least Vista is smart enough to turn it off for you when the situation merits it.
On no other platform do you ever have to think about syncing refresh rates. On X, you're at the mercy of the driver and window manager. On an nVidia card you're probably ok. On a recent Intel card you might be. On ATI it's a complete crapshoot. Throw in compositing and it gets even more complex.
Meanwhile, on much of the same hardware, you could run a hacked version of Mac OS X and not see a lick of tearing or artifacting.
I'm not saying that IRIX didn't do have that problem, but that, at the time, you could buy a commercial UNIX workstation and get a decently-integrated X server. The problem then was that you had to pay an astronomical sum to get the same window management performance that you took for granted on a Mac, and that a heck of a lot of tuning, testing and integration had to happen to get your (very expensive) video or 3D application to work, again, as well as a Mac.
Nowadays, you don't have to spend a fortune tog get decent X. What you have instead is that you're stuck with one card family (nVidia) or checking experimental code out of various git respositories, and even then you're not guaranteed the level of seamless video behaviour that you'd see on a Intel-based machine running Windows Vista.
I'm glad some people get decent X performance, but spending more than a little time on, say, Phoronix or Ubuntu's forums should disabuse you of the notion that everything works.
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Re:So in other words (Score:4, Informative)
I'm dragging a Firefox window over a dead RDP session right now. It's erasing the contents of the window. I've never, ever managed to do that on MacOS X and not often on Windows Vista.
For RDP that makes sense- compositing doesn't happen over Terminal Services. What normally happens on Windows, is that when the Window Manager (not Aero) detects that an application has stopped responding to WM_PAINT messages, it actually swaps out the window for a special one that looks just like the last known good copy of the windows display surface. If it can't for some reason, it just dumps a plain white window with loading cursor instead.
That's actually intentional.
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X11 Chromium on Mac? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anybody know if it's possible to compile a version of Chromium for X11 Mac?
X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Funny)
So you are saying it is not X11 that is slow but Linux... Oh man you are taking it out of the frying pan and into the fire.
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair I think the gp meant Linux exclusive, not native. But even then Firefox is a pretty bad choice, since its development has always had Linux in mind as well as other platforms.
If you benchmark some random 3D games between Linux and Windows there is no Linux slow-down. If you benchmark the responsiveness of a well written GUI environment on Linux vs Windows, there's no slow-down. In fact, I've only rarely run into a situation where Linux is slower than Windows in a GUI or otherwise. The primary reason I've come to realize is lazy programmers writing slow client software, and in some cases, horribly inefficient GUI toolkits (Gtk, I'm looking at you).
X11 isn't the bottleneck, and ever since a few tweaks were done for desktop users, the Linux kernel isn't either.
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
Yes, exactly. X11 ran reasonably complicated applications 20 years ago on hardware that we throw out as woefully inadequate (or quaintly archaic) today, and did so with entirely acceptable speed. X11 isn't the problem -- hardware is what, two orders of magnitude faster now? -- it's all of the poor programming practices that have layer upon layer of abstraction and interpretation stacked tall and high.
I had a 266 MHz laptop in the mid 1990s (about 15 years ago) that ran Linux (RedHat 6.2, mostly) and X11 perfectly well with a mere 64 MB of main memory. A while ago, I tried to load a Fedora release (9, if I recall correctly) on it. "Laughable" is a good term to describe the result. My current laptop has a 10x faster processor and 50x more memory. There's more cache on the processor in my new laptop than total system memory on the old one --- And yet, Fedora 11 feels sluggish on the new hardware. X11 is not the problem.
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:4, Informative)
memcpy of 1000s of bytes is slower than sending a message. Many of these systems that provide direct access to RAM require lots of copying too. (OSX one example I'm most familiar with)
X11 also supports direct access to memory, but it is only used in very specific circumstances because it's extra work to set up.
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never had performance issues running X11 over a LAN. VNC, on the other hand, is noticeably sluggish (RDP seems to work well though). I don't run apps over a WAN very often, except for the occasional emacs session (which is a bit laggy but useable).
But more importantly, the X style of remote access is much, much more useful than VNC/RDP. Remote apps integrate seamlessly into my desktop, instead of being stuck in a separate window. And multiple people can run remote apps on the same machine, without interfering with each other or a user who's physically sitting at the machine.
VNC and RDP are useful hacks for systems that weren't designed for remote access, but they're no replacement for real network transparency.
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Informative)
VNC and RDP give you the ability to interact in an explicitly remote sense, the windows in question operate on the remote server instance and will remain in existence regardless of what happens to the local system.
That's one reason I stopped using X11 forwarding even though I could: If I lost connection on my laptop for any reason, every application I had open was dead. With VNC (or RDP), they were always running remotely.
Also, if I have an application open on display :0 I have no way (that I know) of moving it from :0 to :10 and having it appear uninterrupted on my local display.
I'd say that they're extremely useful hacks that solve issues that are, at least for me, unresolved in X11.
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Informative)
I've never had performance issues running X11 over a LAN.
VNC and RDP are useful hacks for systems that weren't designed for remote access, but they're no replacement for real network transparency.
Oh no you don't!
Try using X11 over something slightly slower as LAN. Just try it, over ADSL, whatever
I tried. And X11 is totally and utterly USELESS. A well configured VNC (and you have to really play with the knobs) is usable. RDP is the best (of course, it wasn't developed by Microsoft...)
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:4, Informative)
If VNC is usable, you'll love NX [nomachine.com]. It is *far* more responsive for a given bandwidth/latency and it is persistent too (the session keeps running if your client disconnects.).
You can even run VNC to other machines through NX and it feels faster on limited bandwidth (NX creates a session on the Linux client that runs a fullscreen vncviewer to another system.)
It's my standard way of working remotely. My default work desktop lives on a Linux machine at the office and it resizes automatically depending on what screen size the client uses (as long as your Gnome or KDE version is recent.) Even at the office I run NX to my work session - over a LAN I can't tell the difference between local and NX.
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Re:X11 has never been a problem. (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, X11 gets network-transparency essentially for free. The system requires some sort of inter-process communication, even when running on a local machine, and Unix-domain sockets are one of the fastest IPC mechanisms available short of shared memory (which is orders of magnitude harder to get right). X11 supports shared memory for local processes, to speed up communication of large objects like pixmaps, but the core protocol is socket-based and there is absolutely no reason to change that. So long as this is the case, why not support network transparency? BSD network sockets are interchangeable with Unix-domain local sockets once the connection has been established, so it's not like there's much more effort involved.
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Really? (Score:3, Informative)
20% faster on his 20% faster machine.... (Score:5, Insightful)
After doing a fresh install on both systems the guy determined that it was just some sort of freak occurrence. He had one laptop with a 2.0ghz processor and another with a 2.4ghz processor and after the reinstall on both systems, VOILA...it was only roughly a 20% difference...
TFA - just keep reading further and further down the usenet post
Choosing the correct abstraction layer (Score:5, Insightful)
If you choose your abstraction carefully, you can hide expensive details from user space.
In the short term it may not gain you anything.
But if the abstraction lives and thrives, then much can go on behind the scenes to improve the situation.
Java is another example of this: they carefully designed the language so that it would be possible to make vast simplifiying assumptions and implement optimizations that really improve performance without impacting the "other side" of the wall. Originally java was slow, but hard work behind the scenes means that your java programs run much faster now, without any extra effort on the part of the application developer.
X Windows is a great example of this. Originally we had dumb frame buffers with no acceleration at all. And yet X provides an abstraction that allows lots and lots of hardware optimizations to take place.
The Windows and OSX abstractions for the display don't provide an API that allows these sorts of optimizations to be done behind the scenes. We have incredible display hardware with awesome features that go unused in these environments because the display abstractions do not allow for them.
Re:Choosing the correct abstraction layer (Score:5, Interesting)
X itself is undergoing incredible levels of development and improvement. Way back when, "The Open Group" tried to say that X was "complete" with X11R6, and no more development was needed, though somehow defects and omissions let numbers start creeping in after the decimal point. IIRC it got to somewhere in the X11R6.3-X11R6.5 range. Then XFree86 took over, ramping up some innovation, though still slower than many liked. After that X.Org took over, decided it was high time for X11R7, (They did X11R6.9 as a stage to get there.) and things started moving faster.
At this point, they're redrawing the lines (KMS, DRI/DRI2, DRM) between kernel and user space to (hopefully) get a better balance speed and stability/security. They've pretty much reworked the 2D acceleration (*XA) and are reworking the 3D acceleration (Gallium3D) which will also simplify driver development. The inteface has been reworked down near the protocol level (xcb) to improve speed and memory usage. One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
The next 6-12 months will be very interesting for X-Windows, but then again, the past few years have been interesting, too.
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Re:Choosing the correct abstraction layer (Score:4, Insightful)
"X11 doesn't expose that kind of stuff."
I'm not talking about the stuff that is exposed. I'm talking about the things that are NOT exposed. X11 runs great over the network because of all the things that they chose to NOT allow the user to do.
Sure you can accelerate bit-blitting, that is really old school.
Take a look at the fundamental model. When you move a window in Windows, the app is notified and it has to respond. Try moving the window of an unresponsive app, it does not redraw because Windows is asking the app to redraw it. When you move the window of an unresponsive app in X, the window redraws because X already knows what it needs to know about redrawing the window without having to make a trip back to the application.
Those are the kinds of things that you DON'T expose. That way the driver and hardware are free to implement them as they see fit.
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Re:Choosing the correct abstraction layer (Score:5, Informative)
No X11 can do Windows 7 and Vista and OSX expose features ... and does so .....
The whole point is that X11 does not draw Windows it draws tiles ... Window Managers draw windows ... and they can draw 3d glass dancing Windows on X11 without X11 caring about it ...
On Windows the layers are Driver - GDI - Application ...)
On X11 the layers are Driver - Kernel - X11 - Window Manager - Application (there may be more
The point is that you do not need to Expose the low level stuff to the application. .. just to the window manager, the application should not have to worry about redrawing itself, or resizing the window etc... it should let the window manager worry about that
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Re:Choosing the correct abstraction layer (Score:4, Informative)
Uhhhh... have you seen Compiz, Beryl, Metisse, Gnome-Shell or any of the other whiz-bang screen-flipping and warping and cubing desktops? They do run X11 apps... through an X11 extension, be it AIGLX or XGL or something similar. X11 exposes whatever you want through the use of extensions, including the stuff needed to do 3D window manipulation. It did this when Vista was still Longhorn, let alone Windows come lately annex 7...
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Memcpy not the biggest problem for chrome/chromium (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure that the biggest slowdown for Chrome isn't the memcpy/bitblitting for the display - it's probably something to do with the insanely big history files it generates as part of it's searchable history.
Files you can't limit in size, can't compress, can't optimise. Instead all you can do is to delete them and loose all your precious history information.
It also has the bonus of providing a searchable address bar that performs significantly worse than firefox's searchable address bar !
I use both firefox and chrome simultaneously at home and at work, dedicated each browser for different tasks I do. It's a real shame that Chrome is being seriously degraded over time by this fault - I've started switching back to firefox because of it as my laptop just struggles too much with it now...
X11 is not bloated (Score:5, Interesting)
X11 is not bloated nor slow, GTK is both. Put 100 or so spinedits on one form in Win32 and in GTK. On netbook or anything other than quadcore machine, you will see significant difference in speed. And it is not because of the graphics. Sometimes I think GTK render fractals somewhere just to keep processor busy. Meanwhile, when I draw 100 spinedits using only cairo, it is almost as fast as Win32 while giving the same output as GTK including shadows, gradients, etc... I've being noticing this GTK behavior since forever.
GTK folks, please fix it.
Uninformed and wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
"For whatever reason, Linux drivers have NEVER taken advantage of this, and that is why Linux often looks clunky compared to Windows on the same hardware."
This is just BLATANTLY WRONG.
All you need to do is read the feature announcements for the nVidia and ATI display drivers, which you apparently DON'T DO.
nVidia's REAL target market is the folks who work at animation companies, and the hard-core data visualization people. Their products are designed to fly in THIS environment. This market is VERY HEAVILY tilted toward Unix. That is WHY you can get such EXCELLENT display support under Linux. The rest of us are just piggybacking off of this.
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Other performance gains (Score:5, Insightful)
How about a Qt build of Chromium as opposed to a GTK build of Chromium? I'd be real curious to see how it performs.
I was also saddened to see the port team bitch and complain initially that they had to use GTK, because GTK is "the standard toolkit" for Linux, while in the same paragraph complaining that Linux doesn't simply have one standard toolkit. Last time I checked, Windows has a bevy of toolkits and APIs to choose from as well. They also complained that writing audio in Linux was difficult.
If they had written a Qt app from day one, porting would be minimal, they wouldn't have to maintain this huge separate trunks, it would have worked from day 1 on Solaris, Mac, Linux, Windows, BSD, etc. Audio would have been very easy to code with Phonon.
I'm curious to see if Chrome (the browser and OS) are indeed both developed with GTK, then will they both need some retrofits when GTK 3.0 ships, further complicating the matter?
Re:Other performance gains (Score:5, Funny)
A Qt build of chromium exists, and is normally known as "konqueror".
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Re:Other performance gains (Score:4, Informative)
Windows does not have a bevy of toolkits to choose from out of the box.
Yet Windows developers often find the core Win32 API doesn't fit their needs, and waffle between toolkits like GTK, wxWidgets, Qt, and the usual cross-platform suspects. They also turn to .NET, Java (technically a whole language), MFC and others.
I constantly run into issues where I need to download a runtime to run a Windows app, because many developers don't simply develop for what is out of the box with a standard Windows install.
I've seen native X11 apps offer up checkboxes, form elements, and the like. So it is possible. It just doesn't look nice.
Developing audio on Windows is not necessarily standard, not easy. That is why apps might ship with their own separate audio library like OpenAL, tie into QuickTime, etc.
I have some non-trivial Windows apps that were built for Win95 that still run in Windows7.
Sadly, there were many Windows 95 era apps that were still 16 bit, which don't work in x64 versions of Windows 7. Half of my games (mostly from the XP era, not Win95 era) wouldn't work properly in Windows 7. Windows breaks compatibility all the time, even with service packs. Saying you have a particular app that still works doesn't mean the Win32 API has stayed the same, because it hasn't.
The GTK API has stayed mostly the same over the 2.x life-cycle. That is likely to change with GTK 3.
Now, I'm not a fan of GTK by any means. However, the GTK 2.x API has been around since 2002. Anything written for that API should still work fine today.
If they wanted the easy way out, they would have used wxWidgets, which at least feels native (by using the native toolkits) across Windows and Mac, and GTK on other Unixes.
That is basically what I said, except you apparently didn't get that. I suggested they use Qt (like wxWidgets is a cross-platform toolkit). Qt makes more sense for a variety of reasons, such as native bindings to Webkit (the heart of Chrome), and very easy audio development where you write code once, and then the audio works on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
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Re:Windows and OS X versions, please. (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh. Maybe you don't understand what I am saying....
I KNOW that MacOS 10 is OS X.
I'm asking if anybody has compiled a version of Chromium to use X11 instead of using Cocoa.
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Re:Windows and OS X versions, please. (Score:5, Informative)
Funny, but the real answer is GDI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Device_Interface [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Windows and OS X versions, please. (Score:4, Informative)
No.
Explorer is a cross between your shell and your window manager, its like the Gnome or KDE window managers except most of the window manager functions are the responsibility of process itself in Windows, although they are provided by the standard libraries, which us things like the uxtheme.dll and company to provide a consistent interface until the app goes well out of its way to do otherwise. You can use cmd.exe in place of explorer and apps won't notice the difference unless they interact with explorer, such as things that put items in the notification area (systray to most). Apps do not talk to explorer to display windows any more than apps on Linux talk to Gnome or KDE, or Finder on OS X. None of them have to be installed or work in order for Windows to be displayed. You can kill all explorer.exe processes in windows and you just won't have a start menu or clickable desktop until it restarts. You can not kill the X11 client and do the same, all processes using it will be disconnected and exit or crash.
Quartz is a toolkit/API used within the 'window_server', like DirectX to some extent on Windows. It is not the generic low level API like GDI is on Windows.
'window_server' would be almost the direct equivalent of X11 on OS X in native applications, if you exclude X11 for OS X, which acts as a translator basically between X11 servers (applications) and your X11 client (the gui you see) and passes that along to the window_server process to display.
In reality, all three of these systems use a different mix of the way these components interact and at which layer things are done due to their different designs. There isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between any of the components.
I do not recall which process on Windows handles the GUI, but it is more or less untouchable, unlike in OS X and traditional UNIX where you can easily kill the gui portion, doing so in Windows traditionally would result in a blue screen, this is no longer strictly true in the Windows 6.x versions (Win2k8/Vista/Win7), but I don't recall what process owns that part of the system off the top of my head.
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Re:Even if X is usually slower... (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how you took a bunch of graphics and video related words and threw them together in a post that sounds coherent, yet is totally wrong.
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Re:Even if X is usually slower... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Even if X is usually slower... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Framebuffer is an unaccelerated bitmap display, X11 is an accelerated graphics layer (that can use a framebuffer)
something that writes directly to a framebuffer is going to need a lot of additional programming in order to be as fast as X11 is.
Re:What's with writing "[sic]" after "X-windows"? (Score:4, Informative)
> It's been called X-Windows for a long time. ... incorrectly. It's actually the X Window System.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11 [wikipedia.org]
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What to make of ignorant flamebait? (Score:4, Interesting)
"I also know that graphic displays and inputs are vastly different today than they were 10 and 20 years ago."
Really what is so different other than the number of pixels on the display?
"I suspect that X11 wasn't developed initially with today's needs in mind."
Then perhaps you should read about the original goals of the X window system.
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Re:I read the article. So sue me. (Score:4, Informative)
I guess maybe I'm making bad assumptions, as I don't really know what Chrome's intent with multiple processes is... but I think the answer to your question is no, it wouldn't necessarily impact security and certainly wouldn't fully negate the multi-process approach's advantages.
The major advantage to keeping separate tasks in separate processes, it seems to me, is that they have separate memory spaces. I can't sneakily inject code into another task's buffers if I'm not in the same process. In particular, if the browser spawns a process to execute some plug-in or whatever, there's less risk that the plug-in or whatever can trick the browser into executing malicious code. (Or cause it to crash, but that's more "stability" than "security".)
In other words, the biggest security risk comes from two processes sharing the same process at the same time. I don't think re-use is as big a problem. Sure, if you did a bad job of wiping buffers, then in theory one process could see its predicessor's data; and I guess there are scenarios where that could be an issue, though I'm a little skeptical that a malicious process would go rooting around its uninitialized space "just in case" it was handed a process with something it would recognize as sensitive data from a previous task...
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