Author Archives: Owen

Boot poster challenge

When it comes to trying to speed up system startup, it often seems to me that the work people do is based on blind guesses as to what the actual bottlenecks are. What I’ve really wanted to see is a graphical representation of the boot process along the lines of some of the examples that […]

Screenshot Update

Here’s an update of my Luminocity screenshot from a few weeks ago: As you can see, the main difference is, as promised, window decorations. What doesn’t show up in the screenshot is just how nice resizing with those decorations is. No flash, no flicker, no jitter, no redraws. I could sit there for hours making […]

Texture profiling

With the work I’ve been doing recently with luminocity, I realized that I had absolutely no idea of what was going on for video card memory usage. Rather than putting some one-off print statements into the card driver, I decided to try and make something a little more reusable and convenient. That Sunday-afternoon project ended […]

Virtual events

One of the central objects in the GLib main loop is GSource. What is GSource the source of? Events. But where are the events? There is no event object, and the docs very seldom mention events (though they do frequently talk about “event sources”.) What I realized last night is that there really are events […]

Luminocity

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working on a new toy, a combination window manager and compositing manager with GL output called ‘luminocity’. Note the word toy: I have no intention of ever worrying about all the edge cases and broken legacy clients that you need in a real window manager. I do, […]