misc. questions on Irix 4.0 Statement of Direction

[Phil Karlton]

In order to slow down the impact upon my personal mailbox
I am attempting to answer some of the more common questions
I have seen regarding my posting of 8 December.

1) When will it be available?

    Basically, I don't know. If I did know, I probably wouldn't be allowed
    to say.

2) What does the phrase "network transparent GL" really mean?

    The DGL client side library has been merged with the shared GL library.
    If the DISPLAY environment variable is set, then the rendering will
    be to the remote workstation and a DGL daemon running there. The
    normal caveats about permissions about remote execution remain in
    force.

    And, no, you will not be paying a performance penalty for
    the rendering in the local case. One thing that will continue to
    not work in the remote case is 'callfunc'. GL graphical objects
    will work in both the remote and local cases.

    Existing DGL linked programs will continue to work. The new
    functionality will not be available without relinking.

3) What about fonts?

    XLFD (those long font names under X) will work as will the font manager
    that exists under NeWS. Fortunately, X, fm, and DPS will all share the
    same font bits on the disk. (DPS uses pre-computed rasterizations where
    appropriate. It's faster and makes for much more readable text at small
    font sizes.)

4) How do I get beta?

    If you want to volunteer, contact Ben Passarelli <ben at wpd.sgi.com>.
    Our resources for supporting beta sites are limited, and it may
    be tough to get on the list.

5) Does this include AT&T System V.4?

    Irix 4.0 will not contain any additional V.4 specific features.
    Irix 4.0 will be much like V.4 in that it will be fully POSIX
    compliant, support BSD system calls, mapped files and other
    user-requested features.

6) What goes in which product? Is Motif development bundled with the
base developer's option?

    X is now a basic part of development on the SGI platform. So,
    we will be offering a bundle which includes all development
    tools including X development software. The price of that
    bundle has not yet been determined.

    The Motif runtime license will be included with the base system
    at no additional charge.

7) Will all my GL applications be slowed by having to go over the network
like X?

    No. Local GL clients will continue to dump tokens directly into the
    rendering FIFO. Some operations will be faster. Window manipulation
    will typically involve less thrashing of the swapping pages as the
    NeWS server will not be there running its PostScript interpreter loop.

    In addition, X rendering speeds have been made significantly better
    than in the 3.3 releases. I suspect that those of you who use X will
    be pleased with how it behaves.

8) What else will be in Irix 4.0? File system enhancements? FORTRAN
goodies? etc.

    Other things will be happening, and I don't know the content. The
    major purpose of the original announcement was to give early warning
    that a currently supported feature is being withdrawn with IRIX 4.0,
    i.e., there will be no NeWS window manager. (Don't forget that
    PostScript rendering will be supported through the DPS X extension.)


PK