X in FC7

[Adam Jackson]

Steven Pritchard wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 09:49:06AM -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
>> Sure, but that doesn't explain why we use it for local font access.
> 
> Old (386/486-era) systems with no FPU would seem to hang for seconds
> at a time while the X server rendered fonts.  Even on systems with an
> FPU, using the font server made X *much* more responsive/smooth.

Numbers would be a fantastic thing to introduce to the discussion here, 
if anyone has them.  I'm generally not fond of handwavey performance 
decisions in the name of low-end machines without some proof.

I can personally attest that at least for the OLPC machine, which has a 
pretty crippled FPU, the performance problem for font rendering appeared 
to be the rendering itself, and not so much font load and metric time. 
But I don't have numbers immediately at hand to back that up.  (And OLPC 
ended up dropping xfs for footprint reasons anyway.)

- ajax