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TinyX Case Study
The TinyX is a collection of X11 servers targetted for environments where non-volatile file system space is limited. The size of the executables is small, and runtime dependency on other files are minimised.
RAM requirements for TinyX servers are highly dependent on the actual applications: for applications with significant server-side resource usage, the RAM requirements may not be much different than regular XFree86 servers.
There is also memory usage benefit for applications with low server-side resource usage.
TinyX not truly X
Up until now it has been impossible to build the XFree86 and TinyX servers at the same time. This was because the build options for a device-independent X server components required separate build configuration settings for each and every server.
There are two different class between the main X Server and TinyX:
The first classes concerns highly modular components, such as font renderers and modular X server extensions. This is a minor issue as they can be disabled on a per-X server basis.
The second class is more substantive as it requires less modular components, like X server extensions themselves that are not straight forward becauseof how they have been implemented in the X server. Examples are the XINPUT, XKEYBOARD, and LBX extensions. To disable these second class extensions only for some X servers, and not others, mandates building two copies of some components: a standard fully featured copy, and a "tiny" copy with unneeded features disabled.
We thought that was a design flaw, so we reworked the whole build operation so a true standalone TinyX could occur.
BENEFITS of the new TinyX are:
- Ensuring that both servers are updated along with the main XFree86 server when there are interface changes.
- Resolving the two DDX models has led to improvements in the non-DDX areas of the X server code.
- Allowing requirements for both types of configurations to be satisified via run-time selection of components rather than build-time selection.
- Identifying areas of the non-DDX code that have poor modularity.
- Understanding the requirement differences between the XFree86 server and the TinyX servers
Have Questions?
If you would like to deploy TinyX, contact us to discuss how best to adapt TinyX to your environment.
We would also like to hear about situations where the standalone TinyX is working for you
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