嵌入式linux支持x11吗,多媒体 – X11 - 嵌入式 Linux 知识库

X11 also known as X.org, XFree

or XServer is the most used graphics on Linux, at least on desktop.

Contents

Architecture

X11 works in a client-server architecture with communication going via

fast UNIX Sockets if local or TCP/IP if remote, it’s totally transparent

to users.

Protocol is simple and optimized, often used via libraries like Xlib or

Xcb (asynchronous). Most common commands like mouse movement and expose

events are small so they don’t impact too much. Since communication

happens using file descriptors (either local unix sockets or tcp) one

can easily integrate it in event loops (or main loops) with easy polling

with poll(2) or select(2).

Extensions and Hardware Acceleration

It is extensible and can make use of hardware acceleration. With

extensions like XRender one can optimize 2d rendering paths. With Xvideo

it’s possible to use extra planes and also pass through raw YUV data.

Others like Composite can allow a composite manager to do actual

drawings, possible adding nice effects like semi-transparent windows or

shadows. One can use OpenGL (and OpenGL-ES) with X11.

One extension that worth special note is XShm, or the shared memory

extension, that is can be used to avoid sending images or other heavy

data over the wire. When using XShm images, one just need to send the

image identifier and other image parameters, not the image pixels. This,

however, have the impact that image creation is more expensive since

Linux Kernel needs to zero memory to avoid data disclosure, but it’s

negligible.

Strong Points

Recent efforts are being made to optimize X11 more and its Linux

integration even better, like Kernel Mode Setting, which will avoid

flickers during system boot and also reduce X11 server complexity.

Although one can write directly to wire or use low level libraries like

Xlib or Xcb, usually one write X11 applications using various helpers

and toolkits like GTK,

Qt,

Evas/EFL, FLTK

and more. These libraries are the base of most graphical user interfaces

available for Linux, including big projects as Firefox and

Thunderbird, Pidgin Instant

Messenger, GNOME

Desktop, KDE Desktop,

Enlightenment Desktop and more. These

applications and libraries are primarily developed with focus on X11, so

they’re always up to date and require no porting at all and receive much

more testing. This ready/availability of most famous applications is the

strongest point of using X11, even on embedded systems as showed by

Maemo, OpenMoko,

OLPC and more.

Weak Points

X11 was for a long time neglected from embedded systems tagged as slow

and big. While not the very truth, it do have some true facts.

X11 is usually bigger than alternatives like raw framebuffer and

DirectFB, but it’s not too bad is you

consider minimum system, see Thomas Petazzoni’s talk at ELC-E 2008:

Choosing embedded graphical

libraries.

Due chicken-egg problem and apparently bit more complicated api for

X drivers, embedded hardware manufactures provide more drivers for

DirectFB than X11.

There are benchmarks that show that software-on-software comparison X11

does not add much overhead compared to DirectFB and raw framebuffer:

http://profusion.mobi/node/11