[LUAU] Intel Doubles Down on Linux

[Jim Thompson]

On Jul 24, 2005, at 10:33 PM, Hawaii Linux Institute wrote:


> Last Friday, Sun made available free download of Neveda build 17  
> (or 2nd Solaris 11 beta).  In the release note, Sun mentioned that  
> one of the key events is that "the AGPgart driver is integrated".
>

Yeah, but its a minimal implementation, see:  http://blogs.sun.com/ 
sophia/20050614


> It can be said that, without the emergence of Xorg from XFree, this  
> would not have been possible.  I also believe that the SOS (Solaris/ 
> OpenSolaris) will make a very refreshing improvement in how we view X.
>

I think, perhaps, you don't know, or don't remember the history of  
'X' (properly "The X Window System") and Sun Microsystems.  Sun had  
something better, but bowed to market pressure.

(NeWS...now there was a window system worth having.)

Xorg or XFree86, they still implement the same "bitblt on wheels"  
protocol.   Even Keith Packard said, "The need for the Render  
extension has been present ever since the X server moved from  
monochrome to color; the original rendering architecture was never  
well suited to dealing with color data."

Read that one again.

Render supplants the raster-op manipulations of the core X11 protocol  
with the image compositing operators formally defined by Porter and  
Duff in 1984 while they were at Pixar. These operators manipulate  
color data in a natural way by introducing transparency and allowing  
color data to mix as images are rendered atop one another.   (If  
you're in graphics and you don't know who Tom Duff is,... well,  
you're not in graphics if you don't know who Tom Duff is.)
Porter-Duff compositing uses an alpha channel containing per-pixel  
transparency information to model various photographic image assembly  
mechanisms, such as one might use in a film printer assembling a  
complex special effects scene. One of the most commonly used  
compositing modes is source-over-destination. In this mode, the alpha  
channel and compositing logic are used to mimic the effect of a  
translucent holdout mask and overprinting operation, permitting new  
scene elements to be placed atop one another.

This kind of thing is very important to the image manipulation and  
pre-press crowd(s), and nearly impossible in X without XRender and   
XRender is still incomplete, though you could bring Glitz to the table.

Quartz (more properly Quartz Composer) also uses the Porter-Duff  
compositing algebra.  Something quite similar is also a big part of  
Longhorn (nee:  Windows Vista).   With all the digital image  
manipulation coming down the pipe, you gotta wonder 'Why?'.

But at the end of the day, X11 is fundamentally broken at the  
protocol level for a long, long time now.
jim

(who worked on Movie.BYU a long, long time ago, and ported MITs X  
server to several "interesting" frame buffers in the late 80s.)