Question about the future of Xorg

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 6/14/25 12:45, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
> Imagine consumers using organic led wallpaper to cover walls and expecting to 
> put windows with pictures, videos and homework there. Suppose you have low- 
> resolution cheap OLED wallpaper, 96dpi. 5 meters (16ft) will translate to more 
> than 18000 pixels!

The X11 coordinate space tops out at 32767, so it's not going to scale to wall
size.

>> well i couldn't in my std way - i'd run out of x client fd's - the xserver
>> limits x client count to 128... :) i'd have to enable single process mode in my
>> terminal to keep it a single client.
> 
> Hmmm - scalability issue. We need to fix that in X :)

If you look in the Xserver(1) man page there's an option already:

        -maxclients
                64|128|256|512 Set the maximum number  of  clients  allowed  to
                connect to the X server.  Acceptable values are 64, 128, 256 or
                512.

What it doesn't tell you is that there's a tradeoff involved - the X11 resource
id space is divided up into evenly sized chunks per client, so if you go from
128 clients to 256 clients, each of those clients gets half the available number
of resource ids to use.


>>> This problem only arises on Android and IOS because they are designed for
>>> closed source apps and for controlling the user.
>>>
>>> On Linux there is no such problem as long as you use software you can
>>> examine.
>>
>> the problem is 99.9999% of people don't have time to examine it and never will.
>> that includes geeks and developers. i certainly have no time to do that. i will
>> not be re-auditing the source for every app i use every update. i won't even do
>> it once. all those people windows is alienating and try linux certainly won't
>> be doing it either.
> 
> No need for everyone to do checks.
> 
> This is a perfect business case for a distribution like Debian or Ubuntu or 
> Redhat, which offers pre-checked packages, secured with hash sums.

I doubt any distro checks the source code of all the packages they include that
closely.  I wouldn't be surprised if some of the commits I've pushed to X11
git repos have never been looked at by another human being.

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris