On Oct 30, 2007, at 7:27 PM, Ben Byer wrote:
I was able to successfully build and run Xquartz using your above
instructions and your tarball. Can't do -arch x86_64 yet though
(fails while building crAppleWM.m -> crAppleWM.o).
Yeah; we have not made any effort to build Xquartz as 64-bit
because it doesn't seem like there's much benefit to do so -- X11
client apps, sure, but a 64-bit client can talk to a 32-bit server.
I can think of one big benefit, and possibly another:
1) x86_64 has twice as many general registers.
2) Darwin's VM avoids mapping x86_64 pages into the same virtual
address range as the kernel (which is allowed on 32-bit archs under
Darwin, basically a tradeoff in performance so Photoshop can
allocate all 4GB of mem). This basically means that x86_64 has
potentially much cheaper context switches, which is something I'm
guessing X11 does a *lot* of, so that could be a big win for
interactivity across the whole system. I could be wrong about the
nitty gritty details of Darwin's VM, but it's definitely worth
testing out.
So it may not be top priority now given feature bugs, but after
those are handled we'll probably see a nice bump in speed when we go
to 64-bit X11.
