Re: Re: font servers [was: some XFree86 5.0 questions]

Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> [about the advantages of the font service protocol]
> 
> What you're overlooking is that the FS is an extremely limited
> protocol, that is only useful for sending rasterised glyphs.  The sfnt
> font format (used by TrueType and OpenType) includes much, much more
> information that the FS just doesn't provide.

This discussion originally came out of the STSF discussion.  While STSF
uses a "font server" it is nothing like the X Font Server and doesn't use
that protocol.  The STSF font server is explicitly designed for handling
modern font formats such as OpenType and doesn't have many of the limitations
of the old XLFD xfs.

There have been recent discussions about multi-seat support in XFree86.
Sun has this today in our SunRay product, where a single server machine can
be running hundreds of X servers.  (Conceptually, a SunRay is a frame buffer
and USB port that is connected via ethernet instead of PCI/AGP.)  Some of the
design decisions we made for this will also carry over to smaller multi-seat
setups.  By having a single machine-wide glyph cache in our font server, we can
scale multi-seat setups better than a per-server glyph cache (in the RENDER
case) or a per-client glyph cache (in the non-RENDER Xft case).  It can even
improve performance on single-seat setups, especially in situations like public
access terminals where different users login for short sessions.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-      [email protected]
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc.   -   Sun Software Group
	 Quality, Integration, & Customer Success (QICS)
	 Platform Globalization Engin. - X11 Engineering