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 ...!uunet!tmb%ai.mit.edu