Why care about indirect rendering ?

[Eric Anholt]

On Fri, 2005-09-02 at 10:26 +0200, Clemens Eisserer wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> > X uses a network protocol.  While I love the network transparency and
> > wouldn't lose it for anything it doesn't mean you want it when you're
> > local.  In fact you want as little as you reasonably can between the
> > application and the video card.  That's in part why I find this
> > indirect-rendering centered discussion so strange.
> 
> This is something I also never really understood. X forces you to go
> through the network protocol even for drawing also if you're local.
> Windows allows to plug-in a network-layer if you need it (however far
> less professional than X).
> Sure, Unix Domain Sockets are highly optimized - but at least parsing
> out all the trafic should be quite expensive? Or am I completly wrong?

Do you have any evidence that the travel over unix domain sockets is an
actual bottleneck?

This would be the first step in any discussion about making a system to
avoid the transport layer.  I have yet to see anyone bring evidence to
the table.  On the other hand, everyone involved with X (myself
included) that I've heard talk about it totally unconcerned with the
overhead that might exist from network transport for core operations.  I
know when I look at my profiles, network transport never shows up --
it's always unaccelerated graphics operations.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                     eta at lclark.edu
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/              anholt at FreeBSD.org
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