XBF, XIG and Linux

dave methvin from XIG, the guys who make Accelerated-X, Laptop-X, and a host of other X based products for x86 Unix machines wrote me recently about the XBF and related projects. I really meant to post this yesterday, but, well, higher powers had other things in mind. Anyway, click the link to read what he has to say about these projects.

the following was written by dave methvin from xig.

At the risk of taking some shots from the freeware crowd (of which we are a part), I am puzzled by the adulation of free software even when it is rather poor stuff sometimes. As an example - two examples, actually - we have run benchmarks on a Laptop servers published by Precision Insight - distributed by RedHat - and one distrubuted by S.u.S.E.

Besides problems of stability, incorrect drawing and so on, the raw performance of these two servers are less than sterling. The XBF NeoMagic one throws away over half of the notehook's graphical performance at 24 bit color depth. The S.u.X.E.- supplied server for the VIRGE MX notebook tossed away aboout 80% of the notebooks graphical performance at 24 bits. Both servers had some drawing problems, but we won't go into that here.

Free is fine, but at what cost?

The X server is a huge piece of engineering. It is over twice the size, in bin executing code, as the Linux kernel It is central to a properly functioning GUI-based Linux operating system. When the X server "falls over," it is usually Linux that gets the blame. In the Corporate World, which I think we all believe Linux must win if it is ultimately to be successful, will throw out the entire setup if it is unstable, or trashes graphical performance IMHO.

In other words, a shaky X server means a shaky Linux. Why do we risk the success of Linux by pushing such poorly performing X servers?

dave methvin