Why on the whey is X11 so inefficient? (little rant)

[bd139]

W for Windows. That’s what it’s turning into. First we had DCOM, event log and service manager (dbus, systemd) now that.

All hail strongly coupled monoliths. Eins Zwei blue screen next.

[legacy]

guess people must like to waste everything, because this is second to the last and not the last  in a series of things: I checked my emails in my Gmail account two days ago and it worked on my X11-terminal's screen, then guys MUST have changed something in the code, because today it is so full of extra feature and so deadly slower that can't be considered "working"

besides on my PowerBook-G4 it also hangs on Safari with MacOSX-v10.3   

It's another evidence that it's not only a matter of which browser, but also a problem of which WebApps

[djnz]

Are you sure that instead of running firefox remotely, running it locally but tunneling its traffic via ssh to the remote SBC (localhost:someport as a SOCKS proxy, someport redirected to the SBC via an SSH tunnel) won't work for your purposes?

[legacy]

running it locally

There are cases where Firefox can't be compiled locally, e.g. modern versions of Firefox do not exist and will never exist, e.g. because they require Rust or C++11 and there are neither Rust nor C++11 for IRIX, AIX, and these OSes (1). Therefore we use the remote SBC to run a modern browser, exporting its DISPLAY locally.

I have similar constraints now (can't be done, or can't be executed locally) with a customer that needs a particular kind of remote applications made ran on bulletproof screen X-Terminal with anti-vandalism keyboards with the constraint that everything must not be stored nor processed locally, and I was really tempted to develop a radio-KVM, sort of radio in Ghz bandwidth that transmits video stream and send back the keyboard/mouse events, but unfortunately, the customer has already said "good trick, chap, but no dice!"

means I can do it if I wish, but they won't pay for it



(1) we still use SunOS, Aix, and IRIX, in avionics.

[bd139]

Makes sense. Although these days probably cheaper to kiosk up a windows IoT build and use remoteapp.

Surprised to see IRIX still around! Still use the remains of that, XFS, in RHEL7...

[legacy]

Surprised to see IRIX still around! Still use the remains of that, XFS, in RHEL7...

I only have experience as "system admin", never used them as "user" thus I can't tell you what they do with SGIs, but I know some of my customers still use SGI-MIPS for their training simulators, whereas with SunOS I have a direct experience since they are used, and I use them, for the development of firmware of fly-boards of helicopters and aircraft; these boards are PowerPC-driven boards with a lot of FPGA/CPLD and specific ASIC chip, and we have and use a lot of Green-Hills's software under SunOS/Sparc, as well as MISRA-checkers, Stood design, Doors, and strange-software.

We also have a strange Cadence's software for the HDL side, but I don't have experience with it.

Anyway, some of these software packages are very expensive (in term of 50K euro per license), and they are still supported, some are abandoned ... with the Copyright completely expired, oh, but about that you would be surprised by legal actions still taken against "abandonware"

last episodes

• in this episode, we (at DownTheBunker) collected a basket full of legal threats against the uploading of files (and some of them are already on the internet, e.g. on archive dot org) on our FTP located in Switzerland, even if those files already have the Copyright completely expired
• in this episode a friend found an SGI O2 workstation loaded with a licensed version of Autodesk's software, and he wanted to put it on eBay with the hard drive, and ... nobody is using it for job purpose, it's abandoned with all the whistles and bells, but again you got in trouble
  

It means there is still commercial and legal interests 

[westfw]

Would VNC work?

[ejeffrey]

If it was up to me, I would just kill X11 network transparency to prevent rants like this. It was nice when it was designed, then things changed. Just assume that it is not there for any practical applications.

I use it pretty frequently and find it quite usable for some applications.  It's definitely not something I would want to use for my regular desktop, but when I want it I am glad it is there.  I regularly run eclipse, quartus, and wireshark over remote X11 (still on a LAN).  None of those are exactly graphics heavy but they are certainly "practical applications."

[legacy]

Would VNC work?

three defects
- it exports the whole SCREEN, whereas the customer wants to export only the application's window(1)
- without compression, it's extremely slow with bitch-applications like Firefox
- on IRIX and AIX it's rather impossible(2) to compile a common VNC-viewer with compression

(1) there is a trick on my website, it requires more work
(2) for a reason or for another, they all crash when compiled with compression-enabled. Still dunno *exactly* why.

[legacy]

I use it pretty frequently and find it quite usable for some applications.

hw-terminals like Tektronix xp2xx/xp4xx or HP Envizex/Entria, can't use any modern X11 applications based on GTK/QT/... cause the pseudo-color stuff is broken.

A lot of my customers in Space, Avionics, and Defense use these hw-terminals for their intranet's tasks, like accessing to Doors, a database with repositories, constraints, notes, and other reserved stuff to consult something. Basically, they access to Motif and OpenMotif applications running on SunOS/Sparc servers.

eclipse, quartus, and wireshark over remote X11 (still on a LAN).  None of those are exactly graphics heavy but they are certainly "practical applications."

I am not talking about desktop session, just about exporting an application, and I am not surprised, because as I have already written in this topic, if you look at the traffic these applications do, it's nothing special, in fact, I usually use applications like { geany, nedit, xterm, gtkwave, ... } without troubles

but an high-intensitive bitmap application like a browser ... well it sucks on remote X11 because this working scheme generates too much traffic and congestion on both network layer and X11's command's queue

[jklasdf]

Have you tried using NX client (mentioned by someone else earlier). It's quite a bit faster than plain X11:
https://www.nomachine.com/AR03L00795&an=

[legacy]

it's good, but it needs to be compiled ON Irix and Aix, I need the source