Re: GS Back xlib on 8Bit display

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Sebastian Reitenbach wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I got GNUstep up and running on a Tadpole Sparcbook 3GX under OpenBSD ;)
> Riccardo recommended me to use the xlib graphics backend.
>
> Generally it seems to be all fine, besides a little bit slow. Since its only 8
> Bit display, colors sometimes look a bit weirdo ;)
Yes.. well I think display is a bit slow. Before moving and before we 
lost solaris 2.6 support, I tinkered quite a lot with my sparc boxen and 
even on the SMP computer GNUstep felt slow.
A bit the display is slow. 8 bit support used to be unusable, the 
improved a little, but it still doesn't dither well. NeXT had excellent 
8 bit support. Also OpenStep for solaris did run quite well on 
SparcStations. I guess PostScript did a lot of the work as well as 
carefully designed icons and artwork.

Have you tried ART, just for fun?
> When applications are starting, I see the following warning on the console:
>
> WARNING - XGServer is unable to use the fast algorithm for writing to an 8-bit
> display on this host - the most likely reason being the StandardColormap
> RGB_BEST_MAP has not been installed.
>
> My hope is when I can get rid of the warning, then colors may look a bit better,
> and maybe if it then uses the "fast algorithm" things may feel faster on that
> box.
>
> Googling for the RGB_BEST_MAP, I found its related to xlib, but what exactly,
> and how to install it, its not clear to me.
> I hope someone has a cluestick and can point me into the right direction.
I don't, but if we get one we might want try to improve xlib, but it 
could prove hard.

Another reason of slowness is the limited amount of RAM: we got quite 
"fat" lately. My iBook, which has a 300MHz G3, L2 cache and 160MB of RAM 
and an ATI video card is definitely much more powerful than your 
Sparcbook. However, it is slow in usage, compared to my other iBook 
which runs Mac 10.3.9. We are a bit slow in startup, consume RAM. That 
is a bit the same problem i have with the MIPS netbook (Letux 400)  Even 
a base system with Terminal + Ink gets past the 64MB range, with 
GWorkspace running 128MB are little. I don't know how much it is 
GNUstep's fault, X11's fault and generally the OS that got more bloated 
in time.

Try the following: use LaternaMagica and load a fairly big image, 
several megapixels. It will consume quite some memory, but the X server 
will use up even more. LaternaMagica doesn't have optimizations in this 
regard (it loads the whole thing) but used on Mac I can handle the same 
images easily. a 30MPixel will kill my Laptop with 1G of ram because of 
memory exhaustion (I have seen 500Mbytes+ allocated to Xorg).

If we have some kind of inefficiency there and see that GNUstep uses a 
lot of images...


Riccardo