tmb@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) (05/22/89)
Given the discussion of Bell Technologies X11R2 port and the BLIT card
on this newsgroup, I'm curious as to whether there even ARE any other
X11 products for 386 UNIX/XENIX out yet (I know that SCO has *announced*
Xsight).
If you know of any X11 servers for 386 UNIX, please send me mail and
include the following bits of information/benchmarks, or, if you feel
like it, respond directly to the net. If response warrants it, I'll
summarize what I receive to the net.
(0) what operating system (System V/386 Release ? from ?, XENIX
from ?, Mach from ?, etc.) does it run under? What
operating systems does the vendor claim it will run under?
What graphics boards and modes does it support (Hercules, EGA,
VGA, VGA 800x600, Video 7 VGA 1kx768, BLIT, etc.).
What kind of networking does it support (Starlan, TCP/IP, ...)?
What kind of IPC does it use on for local connections
(shared memory, streams, sockets, ...)? Please distinguish what
the vendor claims from what you have actually tested.
(1) what release of X11 is it? X11R1, X11R2, X11R3? (Please do not
confuse the X11 release with the System V/386 release or the
vendor specific release). One way of telling whether you have
X11R3 is to type "xlsfonts". If you get very long font names
that describe Adobe fonts, you probably have X11R3. Is your
server based on the AT&T X11R2 port?
(2) What configuration (memory, disk, CPU speed, 387) are you
using it with? Is this sufficient to run the server? To run
the server and Emacs? To run the server and XFIG? How much
memory do you think you would realistically need to run
this X11 server? Does the server seem fast enough? To put
this in perspective, please let me know what other X10/X11
servers you have used on what machines and feel free to compare.
(3) Please conduct the following simple benchmark:
-- boot the machine and start up X
(if this is too inconvenient and/or if you have LOTS of memory
(>=10M) don't bother, but indicate this)
-- make an 80x24 xterm in 6x10 font, turn off logging, turn off
scroll bars, turn off page mode, turn off jump scroll (VERY
important!)
-- cd /tmp
-- sed 2000q /etc/termcap > out
-- time cat out
-- please report the amount of REAL time (not system or user time
that "time" returns)
-- ls -l out
-- please report the size of the file "out"
You may quibble that this is a rather biased measure of X11
server performance, but I personally tend to use X11 mostly
for displaying and editing text, and this is probably true
of many other people as well.
(4) what widgets and/or toolkits does the distribution come with?
What kinds of problems have you encountered when porting X11
code to this distribution? What other kinds of goodies are included
in the distribution?
(5) any other comments that you may have.
If you are associated with the vendor of this X11 server, please
indicate this. Release dates and whether you describe actual performance
or expected performance would also be appreciated.
Thanks,
Thomas.
tmb@wheaties.ai.mit.edu,
tmb@ai.mit.edu
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