Small X server?

Alex Stewart alex at foogod.com
Wed Jan 24 15:56:04 PST 2007


Greetings all..

My apologies if this has already been answered elsewhere.. I've been looking
and all I can really find are questions with no answers (or answers that seem
really out of date)..

I'm looking to build a Linux + X system on a semi-embedded platform (full ia32
architecture, but with limited RAM and no disk (running off ramdisk)).  I'm
therefore looking to build an X server that takes up as little memory/disk
space as possible.  I don't need anything fancy, but would like to be able to
run basic (custom) GTK applications against it..

First of all, does anybody have suggestions on the best way to approach this?

I've found a bunch of references out there to the kdrive/Xserver stuff, but all
of the documentation out there seems to be rather old (XFree86 days), and it's
rather unclear what, if anything, has been done in the past couple of years
with this.  I did see a couple of cryptic comments here and there that kdrive
had been "integrated" into Xorg 7.1.  Does this mean it is possible to build a
kdrive-like minimal X server using the Xorg 7.1 sources?  If so, what's the
procedure for doing this?

Performance is also something of a concern, so I would like to have an
accelerated (2D) video driver for my i810-based chipset, but everything I've
seen suggests that there's no kdrive i810 driver available, so I'd probably
need to make one myself.  For this reason I was also considering just using the
full Xorg X server but trying to cut out all the extra bits I don't need, but
what little I've seen makes it sound like this is a huge chore.  How hard is it
to whittle down the Xorg X server to a minimal build, and how would this
compare to building a kdrive server and porting a video driver to it (both in
terms of work and in terms of the size of the results)?

Basically, what's the best way to build a small X server, preferably using the
current Xorg sources, acceleration, etc?

Thanks in advance for any help..
-alex



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