X Window System: Encyclopedia - X Window System

X Window System

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In computing, the X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays. It provides the standard toolkit and protocol to build graphical user interfaces on Unix, Unix-like operating systems, and OpenVMS; and almost all modern operating systems support it.

X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the screen and interacting with a mouse and keyboard. X does not mandate the user interface — individual client programs handle this. As such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly; different programs may present radically different interfaces.

X features network transparency: the machine where application programs (the client applications) run can differ from the user's local machine (the display server). X's usage of the terms "client" and "server" is the reverse of what people often expect, in that the "server" is the user's local display ("display server") rather than the remote machine.

X originated at MIT in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project,with the current reference implementation, version 11 release 7.0 , available as free software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses [1].

X Window System - The X client-server model and network transparency

X uses a client-server model: an X server communicates with various client programs. The server accepts requests for graphical output (windows) and sends back user input (from keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen). The server may function as any one of:

• an application displaying to a window of another display system
• a system program controlling the video output of a PC
• a dedicated piece of hardware.

This client-server terminology — the user's terminal as the "server", the remote applications as the "clients" — often confuses new X users, because the terms appear reversed. But X takes the perspective of the program, rather than the end-user or the hardware: the local X display provides display services to programs, so it is acting as a server; the remote program uses these services, thus it acts as a client.

The communication protocol between server and client operates network-transparently: the client and server may run on the same machine or on different ones, possibly with different architectures and operating systems, but they run the same in either case. A client and server can even communicate securely over the Internet by tunneling the connection over an encrypted connection.

To start a remote client program displaying to a local server, the user will typically open a terminal window and telnet or ssh to the remote machine, tell it to display to the user's machine (e.g. export DISPLAY=[user's machine]:0 on a remote machine running bash), then start the client. The client will then connect to the local server and the remote application will display to the local screen and accept input from the local input devices. Alternately, the local machine may run a small helper program to connect to a remote machine and start the desired client application there.

Practical examples of remote clients include:

• administering a remote machine graphically
• running a computationally-intensive simulation on a remote Unix machine and displaying the results on a local Windows desktop machine
• running graphical software on several machines at once, controlled by a single display, keyboard and mouse.

X Window System - Design principles of X

In 1984, Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys set out the early principles of X:

• Do not add new functionality unless an implementor cannot complete a real application without it.
• It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is. Do not serve all the world's needs; rather, make the system extensible so that additional needs can be met in an upwardly compatible fashion.
• The only thing worse than generalizing from one example is generalizing from no examples at all.
• If a problem is not completely understood, it is probably best to provide no solution at all.
• If you can get 90 percent of the desired effect for 10 percent of the work, use the simpler solution. (See also Worse is better.)
• Isolate complexity as much as possible.
• Provide mechanism rather than policy. In particular, place user interface policy in the clients' hands.

The first principle was modified during the design of X11 to: "Do not add new functionality unless you know of some real application that will require it."

X has largely kept to these principles since. The reference implementation is developed with a view to extension and improvement of the implementation, whilst remaining almost entirely compatible with the original 1987 protocol.

X Window System - User interfaces

X deliberately contains no specification as to application user interface, such as buttons, menus, window title bars and so on. Instead, user software - such as window managers, GUI widget toolkits and desktop environments, or application-specific GUIs, such as point of sale - provide/define all such details. As such, the "typical" X interface has varied tremendously over the years.

A window manager controls the placement and appearance of application windows. This may have an interface akin to that of Microsoft Windows or of the Macintosh (examples include Kwin in KDE or Metacity in GNOME) or have radically different controls (for example: twm, the basic window manager supplied with X). The window manager may be bare-bones (e.g. twm) or offer functionality verging on that of a full desktop environment (e.g. Enlightenment).

Most users use X with a full desktop environment, which includes a window manager, various applications and a consistent interface. GNOME and KDE occur most commonly. The Unix standard environment is the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). The freedesktop.org initiative addresses interoperability between desktops and the components needed for a competitive X desktop.

X Window System - Implementations

The X.Org reference implementation serves as the canonical implementation of X. Due to the liberal licensing, a number of variations, both free and proprietary, have appeared. Commercial UNIX vendors have tended to take the reference implementation and adapt it for their hardware, usually customising it heavily and adding proprietary extensions.

Up to 2004, XFree86 provided the most common X variant on free Unix-like systems. XFree86 started as a port of X for 386-compatible PCs and, by the end of the 1990s, had become the greatest source of technical innovation in X and the de facto steward of X development [2]. As of 2004, the most popular X server is the current X.Org reference implementation, a fork of XFree86.

While computer aficionados most often associate X with Unix, X servers also exist natively within other graphical environments. Hewlett-Packard's OpenVMS operating system includes a version of X with CDE, known as DECwindows, as its standard desktop environment. Apple's Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) includes X11.app, based on XFree86 4.3 and X11R6.6, with better Mac OS X integration. Third-party servers under Macintosh System 7, 8 and 9 included MacX.

Microsoft Windows does not come with support for X, but many third-party implementations exist, both free software such as Cygwin/X, Xming, WeirdMind and WeirdX; and proprietary products such as WiredX, Exceed and X-Win32. They normally serve to control remote X clients.

When X is hosted on another windowing system (such as those of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS) the X system is generally "rootless", meaning the host windowing environment is responsible for the root window (the background and associated menus) and for managing the geometry of the hosted X windows — although some servers, such as Exceed, can also create the root window for the remote clients to display to as a separate window in the host system.

X Window System - X terminals

An X terminal consists of a piece of dedicated hardware running an X server as a thin client. This architecture became popular for building inexpensive terminal parks for many users to simultaneously use the same large server. This use very much aligns with the original intention of the MIT project.

X terminals can explore the network (the local broadcast domain) using the X Display Manager Control Protocol to generate a list of available hosts that they can run clients from. The initial host needs to run an X display manager.

Dedicated (hardware) X terminals have become less common; a PC with an X server typically provides the same functionality at a lower cost.

X Window System - Limitations and criticisms of X

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook devoted an entire chapter, "The X-Windows Disaster", to the problems of X in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System (1990) by Gajewska, Manasse and McCormack detailed problems in the protocol with recommendations for improvement.

X Window System - Video hardware

The performance edge for graphical computing is now in the most advanced graphics functions. Manufacturers typically implement these in proprietary drivers, generally writing for Windows (the largest consumer-market) first. XFree86 and the X.Org Server have reverse-engineered drivers for many older cards. However, as the high performance video market offers " state-of-the-art" products, some vendors regard programming details as trade secrets or as patentable inventions that they do not wish to reveal.

Many current implementations of X manipulate the video hardware directly. A misbehaving server can render the display unusable even if the underlying operating system continues to function, possibly requiring a reboot. The Direct Rendering Infrastructure attempts to alleviate this.

X Window System - User interface features

X deliberately contains no specification as to user interface or most inter-application communication. The result was several vastly different interfaces, and applications that did not quite work together. The ICCCM, a specification for client interoperability, is notoriously difficult to implement correctly. Further standards efforts such as Motif and CDE did not remedy matters. This has frustrated users and programmers [3] for a long time. Consistency of application look and feel and communication is now generally addressed by programming to a specific desktop environment or to a specific widget toolkit, which also avoids having to deal directly with the ICCCM.

X does not include good network-transparent sound. As users increasingly expect sound, this has led to various incompatible sound subsystems. Most programmers in the past chose to ignore the network issue and simply use local, OS-specific sound APIs. The first generation of client-server sound systems included rplay and Network Audio System. More recent efforts have produced EsounD (GNOME) and ARts (KDE). Development has started on another system, Media Application Server.

Until recently, X did not include a good solution to print screen-displays. Many X clients print to PostScript entirely separately from what they send to the server. Xprint was first included in X11R6.3; the client side was good, but many server side implementations were not. The versions from X11R6.8 on are of good quality [4] and are gaining toolkit support.

X Window System - Network

An X client or session cannot be detached from one server and reattached to another, as with VNC. Work is under way to add this facility to X. There are also workarounds (VNC :0 viewers) to make the current X server screen available via VNC.

Network traffic between an X server and remote X clients is unencrypted by default. An attacker with a packet sniffer can intercept and read it. The usual solution is to tunnel X over SSH; most SSH implementations do X tunneling automatically by default.

The device independence and separation of client and server does incur an overhead. X's network transparency requires the clients and server to operate separately. In the early days, this gave a significant performance penalty on a standalone system compared to then-current versions of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS, where windowing was deeply embedded in the operating system. 4 to 8 MB of RAM was recommended for reasonable performance; until the mid-1990s, this was regarded as bloated compared to Windows or Mac OS.

Current versions of Windows and Mac OS X Quartz have internal subsystem separation similar to the client/server divide in X and comparable performance and resource usage to X with KDE or GNOME. Most of the overhead comes from network round-trip delay time between client and server (latency rather than the protocol itself), and is best dealt with by attention to application design [5]. There exists a common misconception that X has a notable performance hit due to its network features; modern X implementations use local sockets and shared memory, requiring very little overhead.

X Window System - Competitors to X

Unix-like systems use X almost universally for graphics. Nevertheless, some people have attempted writing alternatives to and replacements for X. Historical alternatives include Sun's NeWS, which failed in the market, and NeXT's Display PostScript, which was eventually turned into Apple's Quartz for Mac OS X.

Modern attempts to address criticisms of X by replacing it completely include Berlin/Fresco and the Y Window System. These alternatives have seen negligible take-up, however, and the viability of any replacement that is not backwards-compatible with X is widely doubted.

Other competitors attempt to avoid the overhead of X by working directly with the hardware. Such projects include DirectFB and the very small FBUI. The Direct Rendering Infrastructure, which aims to provide a reliable kernel-level interface to the framebuffer, may make these efforts redundant.

Other attempts to achieve network transparency in the form of graphical terminal services include VNC (a very low-level system which sends compressed bitmaps across the network; the Unix implementation includes an X server), Citrix MetaFrame (an X-like product for Windows), Tarantella (which provides a Java client for use in web browsers) and NX technology (a bandwidth-saving protocol for remote display).

X Window System - History

X Window System - Predecessors

Several bitmap display systems preceded X. From Xerox came the Alto (1973) and the Star (1981). From Apple came the Lisa (1983) and the Macintosh (1984). In the Unix world there was the Andrew Project (1982) and Rob Pike's Blit terminal (1984).

X derives its name as a successor to a pre-1983 window system called W (the letter X directly following W in the Latin alphabet). W ran under the V operating system. W used a network protocol supporting terminal and graphics windows, the server maintaining display lists.

X Window System - Origin and early development

The original idea of X emerged at MIT in 1984 as a collaboration between Jim Gettys of Project Athena and Bob Scheifler of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Scheifler needed a usable display environment for debugging the Argus system. Project Athena (a joint project between Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), MIT and IBM to provide easy access to computing resources for all students) needed a platform-independent graphics system to link together its heterogeneous multiple-vendor systems; the window system then under development in Carnegie Mellon University's Andrew Project did not make licences available, and no alternatives existed.

The project solved this by creating a protocol that could both run local applications and call on remote resources. In mid-1983 an initial port of W to Unix ran at one-fifth of its speed under V; in May 1984, Scheifler replaced the synchronous protocol of W with an asynchronous protocol and the display lists with immediate mode graphics to make X version 1. X became the first windowing system environment to offer true hardware-independence and vendor-independence.

Scheifler, Gettys and Ron Newman set to work and X progressed rapidly. They released Version 6 in January 1985. DEC, then preparing to release its first Ultrix workstation, judged X the only windowing system likely to become available in time. DEC engineers ported X6 to DEC's QVSS display on MicroVAX.

In the second quarter of 1985 X aquired color support to function in the DEC VAXstation-II/GPX, forming what became version 9. Although MIT had licensed X6 to some outside groups for a fee, it decided at this time to license X9 and future versions under what became known as the MIT License. X9 appeared in September 1985.

A group at Brown University ported version 9 to the IBM RT/PC, but problems with reading unaligned data on the RT forced an incompatible protocol change, leading to version 10 in late 1985. By 1986, outside organizations had started asking for X. X10R2 was released in January 1986. X10R3 was released in February 1986: this became the first version to achieve wide deployment, with both DEC and Hewlett-Packard releasing products based on it. Other groups ported X10 to Apollo and to Sun workstations and even to the IBM PC/AT. The first commercial application for X (a mechanical computer-aided engineering system that ran on VAXes and displayed on PCs running an X server) was demonstrated at the Autofact trade show at that time. X10R4 was the last version of X10, released in December 1986.

Although X10 offered interesting and powerful functionality, it had become obvious that the X protocol coud use a more hardware-neutral redesign before it became too widely deployed; but MIT alone would not mave the resources available for such a complete redesign. As it happened, DEC's Western Software Laboratory found itself between projects. Smokey Wallace of DEC WSL and Jim Gettys proposed that DEC WSL build X11 and make it freely available under the same terms as X9 and X10. This process started in May 1986, with the protocol finalised in August. Alpha-testing of the software started in February 1987, beta-testing in May; the release of X11 finally occured on September 15, 1987.

The X11 protocol design was led by Scheifler and extensively discussed on open mailing lists on the nascent Internet. X therefore represents one of the first very large-scale free software projects.

X Window System - The MIT X Consortium and the X Consortium Inc.

In 1987, with the success of X11 becoming apparent, MIT wished to relinquish the stewardship of X, but at a June 1987 meeting with nine vendors, the vendors told them they believed that a neutral party was required to keep X from fragmenting in the marketplace. In January 1988, the MIT X Consortium formed as a non-profit vendor group, with Scheifler as director, to direct the future development of X in a neutral atmosphere inclusive of commercial and educational interests. Jim Fulton joined in January 1988 and Keith Packard in March 1988 as senior developers, with Jim focusing on Xlib, fonts, window managers, and utilities and Keith reimplementing the server. Donna Converse and Chris Peterson joined later that year focusing on toolkits and widget sets, working closely with Ralph Swick of MIT Project Athena. The MIT X Consortium produced several significant revisions to X11, the first being Release 2 (X11R2) in February 1988.

In 1993, the X Consortium, Inc. (a nonprofit corporation) formed as the successor to the MIT X Consortium. It released X11R6 on May 16, 1994. In 1995, it took over stewardship of the Motif toolkit and the Common Desktop Environment for Unix systems. The X Consortium dissolved at the end of 1996, producing a final revision, X11R6.3.

X Window System - The Open Group

In mid-1997, the X Consortium passed stewardship of X to The Open Group, a vendor group formed in early 1996 by the merger of the Open Software Foundation and X/Open.

The Open Group released X11R6.4 in early 1998. Controversially, X11R6.4 departed from the traditional liberal licensing terms, as the Open Group sought to assure funding for X's development [6]. The new terms would have prevented its adoption by many projects (such as XFree86) and even some commercial vendors. After XFree86 threatened a fork [7], X11R6.4 was relicensed under the traditional license in September 1998. [8] The Open Group's last release was X11R6.4 patch 3.

X Window System - X.Org and XFree86

XFree86 originated in 1992 from the X386 server for IBM PC compatibles included with X11R5 in 1991, written by Thomas Roell and Mark W. Snitily and donated to the MIT X Consortium by Snitily Graphics Consulting Services (SGCS). XFree86 evolved over time from just one port of X to the leading and most popular implementation and the de facto steward of X's development [9].

In May 1999, the Open Group formed X.Org. X.Org supervised the release of versions X11R6.5.1 onward. X development at this time was moribund [10]; most technical innovation since the X Consortium had dissolved had taken place in the XFree86 project [11]. In 1999, XFree86 joined X.Org as an honorary (non-paying) member [12], encouraged by various hardware companies [13] interested in its use with Linux and its status as the most popular version of X.

By 2003, while Linux's popularity, and hence the installed base of X, surged, X.Org remained all but inactive [14] and active development was largely carried out by XFree86. However, considerable dissent developed within XFree86. It sufferred from a perception of a far too cathedral-like development model; developers could not get CVS commit access [15] [16] and vendors had to maintain extensive patch sets [17]. In March 2003, Keith Packard, who had joined XFree86 after the end of the original MIT X Consortium, was expelled with considerable ill-feeling [18] [19] [20].

X.Org and XFree86 began discussing a reorganisation suited to properly nurturing the development of X [21] [22] [23]. Jim Gettys had been pushing strongly for an open development model since at least 2000 [24]. Gettys, Packard and several others began discussing in detail the requirements for the effective governance of X with open development.

Finally, in an echo of the X11R6.4 licensing dispute, XFree86 released version 4.4 in February 2004 under a more restricted license which many projects relying on X found unacceptable [25]. The added clause to the license was based upon the original BSD license's advertising clause, which was viewed by the Free Software Foundation and Debian as incompatible with the GNU General Public License [26]. Other groups saw further restrictions as being against the spirit of the original X (OpenBSD threatening a fork, for example). The GPL issue, combined with the difficulties in getting changes in, left many feeling the time was ripe for a fork [27].

X Window System - The X.Org Foundation

In early 2004 various people from X.Org and freedesktop.org formed the X.Org Foundation, and the Open Group gave it control of the x.org domain name. This marked a radical change in the governance of X. Whereas the stewards of X since 1988 (including the previous X.Org) had been vendor organizations, the Foundation was led by software developers and used community development based on the bazaar model, which relies on outside involvement. Membership was opened to individuals, with corporate membership being in the form of sponsorship.

The Foundation released X11R6.7, the X.Org Server, in April 2004, based on XFree86 4.4RC2 with X11R6.6 changes merged. Gettys and Packard had taken the last version of XFree86 under the old license and, by making a point of an open development model and retaining GPL compatibility, brought many of the old XFree86 developers on board [28].

X11R6.8 was released in September 2004. It added significant new features, including preliminary support for translucent windows and other sophisticated visual effects, screen magnifiers and thumbnailers, and facilities to integrate with 3D immersive display systems such as Sun's Project Looking Glass and the Croquet project. External applications called compositing managers provide policy for the visual appearance.

X Window System - Future directions

With the X.Org Foundation and freedesktop.org, the main line of X development has started to progress rapidly once more. The developers intend to release present and future versions as usable finished products, not merely as bases for vendors to build a product upon.

X.Org has separated the architecture of the reference implementation into independent modules, each maintainable in separate projects. X11R6.9 provides the monolithic source code for legacy users, but X11R7.0 contains a modular build system for the same set of features [29]. X.Org released this on December 21, 2005 The Foundation plans to release X11R7.1 about four months after 7.0, with considerable feature-improvements.

Many operating systems have started to add kernel support for hardware manipulation. For sufficiently capable combinations of hardware and operating systems, X.Org plans to access the video hardware only via OpenGL and the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI). The DRI first appeared in XFree86 version 4.0 and became standard in X11R6.7 and later [30]. This work proceeds incrementally.

X Window System - Nomenclature

People in the computer trade commonly shorten the phrase "X Window System" to "X11" or simply to "X". The term "X Windows" (in the manner of "Microsoft Windows") is officially deprecated and generally considered incorrect, though it has been in common use since early in the history of X and has been used deliberately for literary effect, for example in the UNIX-HATERS Handbook.

X Window System - Release history

See also

• History of the graphical user interface
• X11 color names

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "X Window System", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki