Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

>> For example, if you run certain games on an XFree86 server without
>> hardware acceleration, it pretty much locks up the X server due to
>> the slowness of the software GL.

AC> Also thats an X server bug.

Yep, but it's tricky to fix.  Another such bug is in the core fonts
code, where QueryFont locks out all clients (causes the server to
hang) for as long as it takes to process.

The fix would consist in noticing that the request is taking a long
time to handle, save the continuation in a data structure, establish a
block handler, suspend the client and return to the main loop.  

This is pretty much what I did in the (now deceased) DPS extension,
except that I was actually only queueing requests synchronously, and
doing all real work asynchronously; conceptually, the PS interpreter
was running in a separate thread (DPS semantics allowed me to do that.)

Considering the lack of interest in both core fonts and software-only
GLX, this might be more than people are willing to implement.

AC> Ditto the same problem with continual 2D handling. If X was a bit
AC> smarter about how it scheduled multiple clients it could minimise
AC> this problem a fair bit

It was my impression that except for the problem with a *single*
request keeping the server busy for long amounts of time, the
scheduling issues had pretty much been fixed in 4.0.  If you know of
any current issues, pray do tell.

                                        Juliusz