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September 15th was the 30th anniversary of the anniversary of X11
The X11 window system turns 30 years old today! X11 which still lives on through today via the X.Org Server on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other operating systems is now three decades old.
It was on this day in 1987 that Ralph Swick of MIT announced the X Window System Version 11 Release 1. As explained in the announcement compared to earlier versions of X, X11 offered "This release represents a major redesign and enhancement of X and signals it's graduation from the research community into the product engineering and development community. The X Window System version 11 is intended to be able to support virtually all known instances of raster display hardware and reasonable future hardware, including hardware supporting deep frame buffers, multiple colormaps and various levels of hardware graphics assist."
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X11-Turns-30
[As a point of reference, Intel introduced the 80386 in 1985 and the 80386SX variant in 1988. --Ed.]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @10:04PM (1 child)
Lots of changes, that for you seem to be crap, but in practice they seem to improve performance and adapt to current hardware. Check benchmarks, what other OS do with other systems, you get in Linux too if the driver uses the hardware to the fullest. Check creativity, people implementing all kind of window managers or plain apps.
Maybe X11 is flexible enough to adapt while keeping backwards compatibility, and the reason it lasted so many years. No app cares if processed via EXA or Glamor, do they? Yet you can get video without frame drops, video sync, 3D, multple monitors, hot plug and many other things inside modern implementations of X11.
Ideal, clean systems are just theory. Practice is dirty while getting things done.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday September 18 2017, @01:31AM
Now that was awfully apologetic. The software just beneath X11, the Linux kernel, shows how a large scale project is properly run. It may have its rough edges, but in terms of cleanliness, compared to the graphics stack above, it is about two magnitudes ahead. And it took like what, two decades, until the multi-monitor screen arrangement preferences looked like that from System 6, from 1988. As far as "flexibility" goes, I have suggested before to replace X11 with TCP/IP, which is even more flexible, and carries much less legacy burden.
The X stack does have to have a certain quality. If it was any worse, it would be booted out and replaced by something more sane, which would probably look a lot like what Google does on Android (e.g. standalone EGL on top of KMS, and a rootless compositor on top of that, and VNC for remote access, because once the pixels are client side, screw architectural network transparency). I lost one (fanless, and fortunately cheap) graphics card to the lack of power management in its X driver. Damaging hardware is pretty far up on the scale of crappy software.
I'm just armchair-bickering here, of course, but if I was in charge, Linus style (or better Theo style, given the smell of the mess) I would boot all hardware dependency and escalated rights requirements out of X, make it one of many clients of Mesa, and prohibit any lower level software, under threat of court-martialing, to have dependencies on X. (Sort of where Wayland is supposed to go, but i remember reading about them introducing yet more horrible dependencies). Mesa in turn would get a unit test suite (based on piglit?!) that firstly checks for pixel precision of test results, and then for speed, so that every 2D/3D accelerating module (e.g. new graphics card) can immediately get a thumbs up/down - while running widely visible "user education" to only spend money on "thumbs up" solutions.
To be noted though, these days, there's the whole matter of GPU processing (non-uniform processing architecture?! NUPA?), but that has to do more with the kernel and less with X. I haven't really looked into how this would be properly dealt with.