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late Christmas gift: freedesktop's Xorg for MeeGo

Moikka. If you follow here [0] you will see a set of Debian packages that Graphics team at Nokia are continuously working to deploy a X11 implementation for MeeGo-Harmattan, where we target embedded systems only. Feel free to use it!

X Census (for 1.9)

Topic’s name is a funny (and friendly) devotion to GNOME Census. So let’s take a look at some numbers from the time Xorg 1.9 was in development - raw data is here. Would be unfair to measure only the work that happened e.g. in X server or in the drivers being developed and come up with the statistics about “who developed X”. X and X development community are quite extensive and don’t concern only “graphics” related, i.e., pixel information that appears on your display screen. This is a very common mistake.

Scrutinizing X memory, part 2: what's taking all that memory?

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.

Scrutinizing X Memory, part 1: overview

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.

multiseat - roadmap

This week our laboratory at university released the MDM utility to ease the process of installation and configuration of a multiseat box. The idea is that the end-user should not use some boring and hard howtos anymore to deploy it. Just installing a distro package must be enough now. Try it, use it, report the bugs and send the patches! :)

Improving input latency

GSoC summary #1 - July 29 The current implementation of X Window System relies in a signal scheme to manage the input event coming from hardware devices. This scheme frequently get blocked when lot of IO is occurring (for instance, when the process is swapping in/out). Get blocked means for instance a jumping cursor on the screen and in GUI is always desirable to prioritize the system responsiveness for end users. The human/computer interface should be smooth and this is the most user visible aspect of a system.

Google Summer of Code 2008

I’m very happy to say that I was selected again to work on Google Summer of Code with X.Org Foundation. Daniel will be my mentor again. Thanks Google. Thanks X.Org! In the last year we did a nice work separating the input event generation code of the X server into a different thread. We saw some performance improvement there specially because the implementation is not using signals anymore to wake up the server when some device emits an event. The reason why is that when a process is in the uninterruptible sleep (D state) signals are delayed and the mouse cursor lags.