Hacker News Reader

> I really don't see why it would need a new protocol.

You'll need API to remap the Drawable to the scanout plane from a compositor on a per-frame basis (so when submitting the CRTC) and the compositor isn't in control of the CRTC. So...

View on HN

This assumes it would be the role of the window manager or compositor rather than the server who decides that, which I didn't think that way. But I guess it'd make sense (policy vs mechanism). "per-frame basis" I don't see why and it just mirrors Wayland concepts. Still, as protocols go, it's quite a minor change, and one applications don't necessarily have to support.

The server doesn't have enough information to do it because it doesn't know anything about window management. At best it could use a heuristic to guess, but one of the reasons Wayland combines the server and the compositor is so that we don't need to pile heuristics into the X server and drivers any more.

Nothing in Xorg is a minor change because it has to be tested with every window manager and compositor before you can even think about merging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com