Overview

Direct Xlib^(TM) is Sun's accelerated implementation of the Xlib Application Programmers Interface (API). It improves rendering performance for graphics-intensive Xlib applications drawing on the local host's display.

Direct Xlib improves Xlib application performance by eliminating the setup, transport, context switch and parsing overhead involved in communicating graphics commands from the Xlib client to the X11 server. Direct Xlib allows Xlib applications to perform graphics operations directly to the graphics device. Direct Xlib uses the services provided by Direct Graphics Access (DGA), available in OpenWindows^(TM), to synchronize rendering operations with the server and other direct access applications (like those using XGL or XIL). Since this improved performance comes from the elimination of this communication overhead, performance is dependent upon the ratio of overhead to rendering time.

Direct Xlib provides the most improvement when rendering small individual primitives or a large list of batched primitives. In the former case, the performance benefits are due to the elimination of the communication time which is significant when compared to the rendering time for a single small graphics primitive. In the latter case, the performance benefits are due to the elimination of the data copy required to transfer the client's primitive data between the client's address space and the server's.

The applications most likely to benefit from Direct Xlib are those in the following industry segments: mechanical design, electronic design, drafting, mapping, and scientific visualization.

You can use the Direct Xlib software with any existing or newly developed application that is already linked to Xlib as a shared library. Recompiling or relinking is not necessary.

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Note - Direct Xlib does not support statically linked Xlib applications or applications that load libX11 by calling dlopen.

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Direct Xlib supports the X11R5 API with level 4 Internationalization. The package name for Direct Xlib is SUNWdxlib.

System Requirements

The Direct Xlib 3.2 software requires the following:

• ^(R) · Sun-4^(TM) or SPARC systems
• SunOS^(TM) 5.5 software
• OpenWindows Version 3.5 software

Supported Graphics Primitives

The following primitives are accelerated by the Direct Xlib software:

XCopyArea and XCopyPlane
XGetImage and XPutImage
XSetClipRectangles and XSetClipMask
XDrawLine and XDrawLines
XDrawSegments
XDrawPoint and XDrawPoints
XFillRectangle and XFillRectangles
XDrawString and XDrawImageString
XDrawString16 and XDrawImageString16
XDrawText and XDrawText16
XmbDrawString and XmbDrawImageString
XwcDrawString and XwcDrawImageString
XmbDrawText and XwcDrawText
XFillPolygon
XDrawRectangle and XDrawRectangles
XClearWindow and XClearArea
XDrawArc and XDrawArcs
XFillArc and XFillArcs

All other Xlib operations are supported by the Direct Xlib software through standard Xlib server rendering. Direct Xlib supports shared fonts, thereby minimizing wasted memory.