Usually faster the number of commits, faster the development process. But development without strict reviewing doesn’t guarantee quality on the code. Unfortunately, rarely you will see people willing or even just being able to review the changes you are proposing. Attract reviewers is hard!

Lemma: The art of writing a good patch series is all about to attract reviewers.

Proof is omitted due to lack of space. Sorry ;)

I’d start to write a post about how to write a nice commit message and patch series, so I could use as a future reference for you.

Previously, the message was for toolkit, now it targets new upcoming developers… okay, if I’d be offensive I could say it targets vendor distributions which care for desktop on Linux :)

I have started hacking on X due the laboratory at my university I was working was running an amazing project to employ computer labs in all high-schools of the state I was living, in Brazil. It was a successful and all 2.100 schools used the multiseat computing model.

We all know since 2006 (?) that the world is turning to use XCB instead Xlib as the interface between X clients and the server. The advantages of using XCB is well know but, even so, it’s being adopted very slowly for some reason - for instance no toolkits yet ported it. If this serves as a motivation, Alan got a really nice measurements porting a simple X app.

Translate your toolkit and application now! :)

So here goes some statistics of the Xorg process running. All the informations were fetch from /proc/pidof Xorg/{smaps, status}. I used also a script found on the Web to parse and organize these informations; Mikhail Gusarov has extended this script to show a very useful output.

Xorg per se

Running just one standalone Xorg -retro. In my system it represents: VmRSS: 5440 kB VmSize: 13620 kB

from those 5440 kB of RSS: 3404 kB (63 %) come from code 1628 kB (30 %) come from malloc/mmap in anonymous memory (heap) 228 kB (4 %) come from other data mapped in memory 180 kB (3 %) come from rodata

This series of documents explore how the memory is used by the Xorg server. They aim to eventually shrinks the memory footprint of the server and its related components, like X clients, modules being loaded and drivers. Embedded devices with constrained resources are the main focus here. All texts are mostly based on x86 and ARM architectures, under Linux 2.6.33 with Xorg from upstream.

Overview

One way to analyse aspects of memory usage of a given program is to scrutinize its object data. Object data contains executable code and static data. Both are of little interest from the process memory management point of view given their layout is determined by the compiler and does not change during process execution. However, we can deduce some nice informations about the object. For instance, from Xorg object we are able to get some statistics about the code, identify its structure and point out architectural mistakes just looking into.

For the first time in life, Xorg is being used in a single platform and for a given device only (other devices have used an X11 implementation but using other non-canonical servers, such kdrive’s based - Tiny-X).

Previously Xorg was being packed to run in a huge amount of OSes - mostly Linux and Unix-like distributions - with the characteristic of be architecture portable and able to run on a huge set of video and input devices. In terms of software, this means an extensive amount of code able to cover all of this mentioned. But this is far from the needs of a small and single platform device.