X Font Server

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The X font server (xfs) provides a standard mechanism for an X server to communicate with a font renderer, frequently one running on a remote machine. It usually runs on TCP port 7100 or thereabouts.

1 Current Status
2 Future
3 Performance
4 Deployment Issues
5 References
6 See also

[edit] Current Status

The use of server-side fonts is currently considered deprecated in favour of client-side fonts ^[1] Such fonts are rendered by the client, not by the server, with the support of the Xft2 or cairo libraries and the XRender extension. No specification on client-side fonts is given in the core protocol.

[edit] Future

As of October 2006, the manpage for xfs on Debian states that:

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Significant further development of xfs is unlikely. One of the original motivations behind it was the single-threaded nature of the X server — a user’s X session could seem to ‘freeze up’ while the X server took a moment to rasterize a font. This problem with the X server, which remains single-threaded in all popular implementations to this day, has been mitigated on two fronts: machines have gotten much faster, and client-side font rendering (particularly via the Xft library) is the norm in contemporary software.

[edit] Performance

User experience show the same performance on both X server+direct font serving and X server+font server path.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Deployment Issues

So the choice between local filesystem font access and xfs-based font access is purely a local deployment choice. It does not make much sense in a single computer scenario.