Bug#163935: xdm does not start / crashes
On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 11:38:47PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> A lot of people with low bit-depth displays began having trouble in
> XFree86 4.2.0 because the RENDER extension in the server preallocates a
> color cube.
>
> In fact, this color cube is 6x6x6, which means that 244 are already
> pulled out of the colormap.
Which means that no sensible amount of free colormap entries is left on an
8bit display.
> See:
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/render@xfree86.org/msg00622.html
Olivier Chapuis writes in there: "Any way, I've no solution as I do not know
why some users need to run a server with depth 8." The answer is simple:
because the hardware cannot handle more. This is a very common case on
non-i386 hardware. Just a few examples: AFAIK most (if not all) of the
Linux-supported onboard framebuffers in PA/RISC systems are 8bits max, as
are the CRX8 and HCRX8 cards (hppa, GSC bus), the PMAG-B, the PMAGB-B and
the Maxine onboard graphics (mipsel, TurboChannel bus), the CG3 and CG6
(sparc, SBUS) and the XL8 (mips, GIO). These are all common graphics options
on their platform and hardware capable of higher colordepths is either not
commonly available or not supported by either the Linux framebuffer layer or
XFree86 in most cases.
> Since I do not think there is a way to tell the X server to disable the
> RENDER extension or pre-allocate a smaller colormap, the best solution
> probably is to just give depth 8 users a black-and-white logo.
This solves the xdm start problem but does not solve the other problems
I have mentioned - with XFree 4.2 many applications are just unusable
on an 8bit display as they e.g. do not render menus legibly, or in some
constellations even the text in a terminal emulator is not legible
anymore. The same applications work fine on the same hardware with the
xserver from XFree86 4.1.0.
Antialiasing does IMHO not really make sense on 8bit displays, so I
sincerely propose to either provide a configuration option for disabling
the render extension or, if that is not possible, to disable it for 8bit
displays in general.
Regards,
Karsten
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