[Xcb] Questions about the X protocol and the XCB implementation

[Jochen Keil]

Hello,

On 29.01.2014 06:19, Bart Massey wrote:
> You could try to get XCB to writev() your C++ data structure for you
> to avoid the copy, but it would be a non-trivial amount of work. It
> would probably involve using the binding generator to build a special
> C++ XCB binding that took various C++ data structures into account.
> Doable, perhaps, but probably not worth the immense effort. --Bart

Thanks for your answer. The main problem is, that I cannot easily reuse
the {xcb_,}send_* functions, because each calls another subsequently.
From what I understand it looks like this: xcb_send_request sets the
length of the request in vector[1], send_request then copies everything
into the connection queue.

Here's what I don't understand. Why is there are queue at all? Why is
the request not sent directly? Also, from looking at send_request() I
get the impression that the request does not get sent immediately when
the request can be enqueued completely (from "if(!count) return;" where
count is the number of iovecs). Does this mean that the request is in
the queue and gets only sent after a sync or when another request fills
up the queue?

Basically, here's what I think I could do. First, create a request
without the payload (because it's in a container). Then copy it into the
queue. After that, copy the payload directly into the queue and
(possibly) trigger the actual send.
That would at least save me the transformation of the container to an
array and I think it could be easier to implement (However, I still
would have to duplicate some code which is something I'm not too happy
about).

Thanks,
Jochen


> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Jochen Keil <jochen.keil at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> currently I'm trying to understand the X protocol and the XCB
>> implementation better. My first question about the X protocol would be
>> if there is something like a picture or so which describes the
>> (byte-wise) layout of a request/event/etc. packet.
>> Maybe similar to what exists for the TCP/IP packets. Or is this
>> a misconception of mine?
>>
>> Secondly I've looked a bit at the XCB implementation, starting from
>> a generated request (xcb_change_property) to the stubs. If I understood
>> it correctly, the request function calls xcb_send_request ->
>> send_request -> _xcb_out_send -> _xcb_conn_wait -> write_vec.
>> write_vec finally send()s the data over the socket.
>>
>> Now, if I have a (high-level) container like a C++ map, I would have to
>> transform (copy) the values to an array first, which then gets copied
>> again by memcpy in send_request().
>>
>> I figured, that it would be good if the values from the container could
>> be written directly to the socket. E.g.:
>>
>> for (k, v in map) { send(c-fd, &v, sizeof(v)); }
>>
>> Now I'd like to know if this makes sense at all and if I could implement
>> this easily by (re-)using the existing implementation.
>> My biggest problem is to understand what xcb_send_request does. Could
>> I just send a request "head" (e.g. for change_property: mode, window,
>> property,
>> type, format) followed by the data in separate send() calls?
>>
>> I hope I expressed my ideas clearly enough. Please ask, if I should go
>> more into detail about something. I also appreciate any critique!
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Jochen
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Xcb mailing list
>> Xcb at lists.freedesktop.org
>> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xcb
> 

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