X Server

The program which draws the contents of the windows onto your screen. This is the program which controls your display and receives your input.

X Client

A program which people generally think of as applications, such as a word processor or a calculator. This does the real work and tells the server what to draw. Due to the client/server nature of X, clients may be running on any machine, local or remote, whereas the server generally runs on the computer in front of you.

Window Manager

Whilst X provides functions to position windows, X itself doesn't specify how the windows are manipulated or positioned, i.e. it provides the mechanism but not the policy. Implementing the policy is the role of the window manager, and whilst most window managers are pretty much the same (see twm, Metacity, or Enlightenment), it does mean some weird and wonderful window managers can be created (see Matchbox or Ratpoison).

Hopefully these three terms are familar to everyone who is still reading!

X Extensions

The X protocol was designed with future extension in mind, and recently there has been a flurry of activity here. Recent major extensions include Render (a decent drawing API), Damage (clients can receive notification of redraw events on other windows, good for VNC servers or programs like Xresponse), Fixes (as the name implies it fixes a number of omissions, such as a better clipboard protocol), and Composite (clients can control how the windows are displayed).

Composite Manager

This is where it gets fun. Combining the Holy Trinity of modern X extensions, Composite, Damage, and Render, leads to the concept of a composite manager. When compositing is enabled windows created by clients are not drawn to the display directly, but to off-screen images. The composite manager is then responsible for drawing the windows to the screen in any way it wants. A basic composite manager would do nothing but copy the pixels (and thus appear idential to running no composite manager), xcompmgr adds real-time transparent drop shadows to top-level windows, and Luminocity wobbles the windows when they are moved.

Note that a composite manager doesn't have to be a window manager, but they often are. xcompmgr is just a composite manager, whereas Luminocity is both a window manager and a composite manager.

So, where do all of these new program fit?

Xgl is a new X server which uses GL to draw. Not only are the core X drawing primites accelerated (like they are on most servers these days), but Render is also accelerated. As the OpenGL specification alone doesn't provide enough API for an X server (for example it doesn't cover manipulating the display size, or input), there are a number of Xgl versions. Xglx uses the GLX extension and is effectively a GL-accelerated Xnest/Xephyr clone. Xegl uses the Embedded OpenGL specification, which adds the required features so that an application can control the entire display and not just a window. With this, Xegl can run directly on the hardware. Note that instead of calling GL directly Xgl uses Glitz, a GL-backed 2D graphics library originally created for Cairo, which matches the semantics of the Render extension.

Luminocity is pure crack. Pure, 100%, pristine crack, rolled into lines by naked Brazilian hand maidens. Who said Owen was a code purist? That said, it is a very good design for a composite manager test bed. To use Luminocity you need two X servers: a target display and a source display. Luminocity reads window contents from the source display and draws them to the target display in a (optionally full-screen) window, by being the composite manager on the source and a normal client on the target. The source display needs to support the Holy Trinity and XTest, so generally is Xfake from the kdrive X server (which doesn't have a visible framebuffer), and the target display is whatever X server you'd normally run as long as it supports hardware-accelerated GL. Whilst this is a seriously over-engineered solution and requires more than a few hacks (XTest is used to forward events between the servers), the result is that time taken to restart it after a build is drastically reduced, as when Luminocity is killed both of the X servers and all clients are not killed too.

The really interesting program we all want to see is glxcompmgr, demonstrated at GUADEC to manic cheers and applause. From what I understand, this is a classic compositing manager in design in that it works with a single display. It achieves fabulous visual effects by extensively using GL, and thus with hardware acceleration is very fast. My guess is that it just draws to a full-screen GL window and so doesn't require Xgl, but will work on any server.

NP: Babylon Rewound, Thievery Corporation