Whats with X

[Deepak Saxena]

On May 02 2003, at 15:46, Rob Wultsch was caught saying:
> Isn't x-window-system something like 50+ megs?

If you include all the applications and libraries, yes. If you
pick and choose what custom apps you want, you can trim that down.
We have embedded systems with 16Mb or less of flash running tiny 
versions of X or X-like windowing environments.

> And what I meant by implementing x in the kernel is having just the very 
> basic x... This would make transitions for mcse's much easier.

But it would also make the system much more unstable. Since X is
running as a separate process in it's own virtual address space,
it is free to do almost anything and if it or an application
on top of it happens to run bad code, X or that app will crash 
and you can restart [1].  If X is now running in the kernel, a bad
piece of code would take your whole system down since it's sharing
the address space and resources with the kernel. Bad. 

There are things that can be done to make X smaller and faster
including trimming down unused functions, using pre-link, etc.
However, these are specific modifications that might have to
be made for a specific usage. A company like RH is trying
to serve as many customers as possible with their distribution
and enable them to use off-the-shelf open source and closed 
source software. For this reason, they need to provide as flexible
of an environment as they can, which means providing the full
range of X capabilities, applications, libraries, etc.

<OT>
The more code is put into the kernel, the more complicated and
unstable it can become.  Part of the 2.5 development process
has been moving things away from the kernel. Used to putting
ip=bootp on the command line? No more in 2.6.  Same goes for
things like root=nfs and other kernel options. These are all
going away and anything that can be done through userspace in
simpler manner will be handled there.
</OT>

~Deepak

[1] Well, this is not completely true b/c X does direct HW access 
    through userspace. Therefore you can end up in a situtation where
	 X puts the HW into a state where things get hosed fairly badly.
	 But this an X driver issue which is slightly different then an 
	 application hosing the system to take it down.

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