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Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

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Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#121

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

michaelmrose wrote: post #114
simoncion wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you -perhaps- using GNOME and the GNOME-provided GUIs to change monitor refresh rate? Given GNOME's history of legendarily user-hostile decisions made in the name of "simplicity", it would surprise me not even a little bit that the GNOME folks decided to pretend that the active monitor with the lowest refresh rate dictated the fastest you could drive any monitor.

This is basically a built in limit of X. The only exception is that monitors that support variable refresh rates may be able to offer this feature in multiple monitor configuration subject to software and hardware options. I'm personally very dubious of the claim. This has basically never been supported because x treats all screens as one big screen unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows bet…

> unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows between screens which is a pretty big barrier to normal usage.

Is it? Or is it forgotten?

Around 1994 I had a Pentium 133 with 16MB. In it a Diamond Speedstar 24(Pro?) (Tseng ET 4k) Vesa Local Bus, some ISA Trident 8900, and an ISA Hercules, driving one 17", one 15", and the Hercules at something like 12" IIRC. One could choose in the BIOS which "GPU" ...err... frame buffer should have priority at boot, or rather which slot, so when you've chosen VLB it took that, and the others were a matter of the OS to initalize and drive way after boot.

At the time I compared 386BSD, NetBSD, SLS(Softlanding Systems), early Slackware and SuSE, and lo and behold, I could move windows across all of them on all of them!1!!

With proudly created custom modelines for all of them, even the Hercules, with different Hz & DPI for each screen.

Though it didn't really make sense, because X on the Hercules was very laggy and jerky, coz' 8-Bit ISA. Was more useful for syslogs and debugger.

Anyways, it worked, even if only as POC, to show off.

Now that wasn't Xorg, but XFree86, but still?

1994. Worky, worky!

IIRC that also applied to Accelerated-X, at least for the Tseng and Trident.

Didn't try the Hercules with X then.

Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#123

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Klonoar wrote: post #113
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I wrote "existed" (simple past).

The “be aware” is the problematic text; nobody cares that a two decade old dead project has the same name.

People who have been programming for a long time often have very good memories of old projects and software in which they had a lot of hope, but which failed at the end.

Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#124

Post by chadgpt3 »

rixed wrote: post #117
chadgpt3 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X screens are legacy. It used to be you could connect to a particular screen by number to open windows on that screen but the modern way to do it is to have one big virtual screen. X screens were like having a separate X server for each monitor, but with a single shared cursor and shared VRAM. You can see why that's an obsolete model.

Please do not see any malice in this naive question, but why is that an obsolete model? Back in the days I had very different displays that I could use to display various windows of a flight simulator (some dedicated to some instruments, the big one for the front view, for instance) and it was quite nice. It sounds like that would not be easy to replicate with a single shared frame buffer, but maybe I'm wrong (I've b…

It's much easier to place a window at a specific position on a large frame buffer than to drag a window between screens when they are separate display servers.

Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#125

Post by Natfan »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #123
Klonoar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “be aware” is the problematic text; nobody cares that a two decade old dead project has the same name.

People who have been programming for a long time often have very good memories of old projects and software in which they had a lot of hope, but which failed at the end.

i feel likt there's likely more programmers who weren't aware of a 20yo (unfortunately) failed project, compared to the amount of programmers who would be aware of this project, if it succeeded

Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#126

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Natfan wrote: post #125
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who have been programming for a long time often have very good memories of old projects and software in which they had a lot of hope, but which failed at the end.

i feel likt there's likely more programmers who weren't aware of a 20yo (unfortunately) failed project, compared to the amount of programmers who would be aware of this project, if it succeeded

> i feel likt there's likely more programmers who weren't aware of a 20yo (unfortunately) failed project

At that time, what should replace X11 was a heavily discussed topic, so people who were already interested in programming under GNU/Linux at this time typically remember intense discussions on the internet about the pro-s and con-s of lots of proposals to replace X11.

Proposals that I have in mind are:

- Y Window System

- Fresco: https://web.archive.org/web/20100729184325/http://fresco.org...

- Xynth: https://github.com/alperakcan/xynth

- Xfast: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xfast/ (here a German article about Xfast from 2008: https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2008/11/ohne-x-tras/ )

- Mir (Ubuntu) as the main competitor to Wayland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)

- Wayland

- ... and very likely many, many more proposals.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Windowing_system&...

Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#127

Post by simoncion »

michaelmrose wrote: post #114
simoncion wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you -perhaps- using GNOME and the GNOME-provided GUIs to change monitor refresh rate? Given GNOME's history of legendarily user-hostile decisions made in the name of "simplicity", it would surprise me not even a little bit that the GNOME folks decided to pretend that the active monitor with the lowest refresh rate dictated the fastest you could drive any monitor.

This is basically a built in limit of X. The only exception is that monitors that support variable refresh rates may be able to offer this feature in multiple monitor configuration subject to software and hardware options. I'm personally very dubious of the claim. This has basically never been supported because x treats all screens as one big screen unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows bet…

> This has basically never been supported because x treats all screens as one big screen unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows between screens which is a pretty big barrier to normal usage

Hmm.

I'm not sure what windowing system you've been using over the past ~thirty years, but you seem to be unaware of both Xinerama (released in the late 1990s) and XRandR (version 1.2 [0] of which was released in like 2006). Maybe you've been using an X11 implementation provided by some proprietary *NIX for all of these years, but whatever you've been using, it has certainly been neither XFree86 or xorg.

> The only exception is that monitors that support variable refresh rates may be able to offer this feature in multiple monitor configuration subject to software and hardware options.

1) Monitors have been able to support multiple refresh rates for ages. This is a big part of why EDID and friends exists.

2) I note that VESA standardized Adaptive Sync in ~2009, and that VRR-supporting monitors were extremely uncommon in the consumer space until the introduction of GSync and the addition of Adaptive Sync to the DisplayPort standard... which both happened in ~2014. Add to that the fact that my secondary monitor does not support VRR, and it becomes very clear that VRR is not a prereq for driving multiple monitors at different refresh rates.

[0] IIRC, 1.2 is the version that gave it feature parity with Xinerama

Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#128

Post by simoncion »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #121
michaelmrose wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically a built in limit of X. The only exception is that monitors that support variable refresh rates may be able to offer this feature in multiple monitor configuration subject to software and hardware options. I'm personally very dubious of the claim. This has basically never been supported because x treats all screens as one big screen unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows bet…

> unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows between screens which is a pretty big barrier to normal usage. Is it? Or is it forgotten? Around 1994 I had a Pentium 133 with 16MB. In it a Diamond Speedstar 24(Pro?) (Tseng ET 4k) Vesa Local Bus, some ISA Trident 8900, and an ISA Hercules, driving one 17", one 15", and the Hercules at something like 12" IIRC. One could choose in the BIOS which "GPU"…

> With proudly created custom modelines for all of them...

Yep. I remember that pride very clearly. I'm also so glad I never have to do that math ever again.

> SLS(Softlanding Systems)

I'd never heard of this one. If the claim that its slogan was "Gentle Touchdowns for DOS Bailouts" is true, then that's a really great pairing of distro name and slogan.

Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#129

Post by michaelmrose »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #121
michaelmrose wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically a built in limit of X. The only exception is that monitors that support variable refresh rates may be able to offer this feature in multiple monitor configuration subject to software and hardware options. I'm personally very dubious of the claim. This has basically never been supported because x treats all screens as one big screen unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows bet…

> unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows between screens which is a pretty big barrier to normal usage. Is it? Or is it forgotten? Around 1994 I had a Pentium 133 with 16MB. In it a Diamond Speedstar 24(Pro?) (Tseng ET 4k) Vesa Local Bus, some ISA Trident 8900, and an ISA Hercules, driving one 17", one 15", and the Hercules at something like 12" IIRC. One could choose in the BIOS which "GPU"…

In 1994 the only way to have multiple monitors was to run X with multiple X screens which did not allow moving windows freely between screens. In 1998 X11R6.4 brought xinerama and proper multi-head with many physical screens but only 1 X screen removing that complication.

May I submit that it is more likely that you are speaking of 1998 instead of 94 rather than this entire technology working differently.

Re: Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust

#130

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

michaelmrose wrote: post #129
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless you run multiple X screens which disallows moving Windows between screens which is a pretty big barrier to normal usage. Is it? Or is it forgotten? Around 1994 I had a Pentium 133 with 16MB. In it a Diamond Speedstar 24(Pro?) (Tseng ET 4k) Vesa Local Bus, some ISA Trident 8900, and an ISA Hercules, driving one 17", one 15", and the Hercules at something like 12" IIRC. One could choose in the BIOS which "GPU"…

In 1994 the only way to have multiple monitors was to run X with multiple X screens which did not allow moving windows freely between screens. In 1998 X11R6.4 brought xinerama and proper multi-head with many physical screens but only 1 X screen removing that complication. May I submit that it is more likely that you are speaking of 1998 instead of 94 rather than this entire technology working differently.

> May I submit(suggest?) that it is more likely that you are speaking of 1998 instead of 94

No. I'm not pulling this out of thin air, or misremembering. It wasn't easy, and it wasn't in the manpages, or only some of it. It was rather involved, and didn't work on first try. Not only that X-thing, but also which TTY/VT was on which head for tailing syslogs, std-error, and whatnot else. But it worked. And with no X on the Hercules, just between the Trident and Tseng, even reasonably fast.

I remember exactly because I moved shortly after that. I also remember which relief Xinerama brought me, when it appeared :-)

Edit: I also remember frying the Hercules and the attached screen with both of them giving me the magic blue smoke, because I've overdriven them a little. But it didn't matter, because that was already abandoned cybertrash at the time, used, and collected just for fun :-)

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