Abstract Design and Implementation of the X Rendering Extension.pdfVIP

Design and Implementation of the X Rendering Extension Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team, SuSE Inc. keithp@ Abstract parts of the extension, most notably the client-side font management, have been developed during the design of the extension. The 2000 Usenix Technical Conference included a pre- sentation outlining the state of the X rendering environ- The development of this extension has occurred in an ment and the capabilities necessary to bring X into the entirely open fashion, with input solicited from all ar- modern world. During the past year, a new extension has eas of the window system community. People involved been designed and implemented as part of the standard with XFree86, KDE, Qt, Gdk, Gnome and OpenGL all XFree86 distribution. contributed to the final architecture. The X Rendering Extension addresses many of the short- Some areas of the specification are still not complete comings inherent in the core X rendering architecture and the implementation is under construction, but Ren- without adding significantly to the protocol interpreta- der has already become an important part of the XFree86 tion or implementation burden within the server. By distribution as toolkit and application development starts borrowing fundamental image compositing notions from to take advantage of its presence. It has also delivered a the Plan 9 window system and providing sophisticated strong message that XFree86 is ready and able to carry and extensible font rendering, XFree86 i