Bug 4325

Summary:

[PATCH] xrdb should use mcpp if it's available

Product:

xorg

Reporter:

Lorenzo Colitti <lorenzo>

Component:

App/xrdb

Assignee:

Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>

Status:

RESOLVED WONTFIX

QA Contact:

Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>

Severity:

enhancement

Priority:

high

CC:

erik.andren, jwarnier

Version:

unspecified

Keywords:

patch

Hardware:

x86 (IA32)

OS:

Linux (All)

Whiteboard:

i915 platform:

i915 features:

Attachments:

Description	Flags
Try preferred preprocessors before falling back to CPP	none

Description Lorenzo Colitti 2005-08-31 11:03:11 UTC

Every time xrdb is called it spawns cpp, which is a 4MB binary.

This is overkill for simply parsing X resource files and slows down X startup
time. If I replace calls to 'xrdb -merge' with 'xrdb -cpp mcpp -merge' I get a
~1 second startup time improvement (from when I type my password to when the
disk stops spinning, under gnome).

xrdb should check if mcpp is available at compile time, and if so use that.

Comment 1 Jim Gettys 2005-08-31 11:04:36 UTC

Got a patch?

Comment 2 Lorenzo Colitti 2005-08-31 11:06:22 UTC

No, I would need to understand how imake works first. :(

But I'll come up with such a patch if it's likely to be accepted...

Comment 3 Jim Gettys 2005-08-31 11:09:00 UTC

The other problem is: how common is mcpp installed, anyway?  It certainly isn't
installed by default on my ubuntu system.

Comment 4 Jim Gettys 2005-08-31 11:12:51 UTC

Also, on my system cpp looks to be the same size as mcpp: 90K bytes.

So where is this problem, again?

Comment 5 Lorenzo Colitti 2005-08-31 11:19:05 UTC

It's not installed by default, but there are Debian and Ubuntu packages for it.
I don't know about fedora.

Regarding size, ccp is 90k but on my system it vforks and execs
/usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.0.2/cc1, which on my system is 4.3M

You can see this with "strace -f cpp"

Comment 6 Lorenzo Colitti 2005-08-31 16:13:22 UTC

Created attachment 3142 [details] [review]
Try preferred preprocessors before falling back to CPP

Tries the preprocessors in the preferred_cpps variable one by one and runs the
first one it finds. If there are no preprocessors or if none can be found, it
falls back to the CPP defined at compile time.

The list of preferred preprocessors defaults to "mccp"

Comment 7 Matthieu Herrb 2005-10-03 13:36:45 UTC

I disagree with this approach. X should use standard utilities as much as possible.
If you want to micro-optimize things this way, you already have all the knobs
available. 
It is also possible to specify CppCmd=/usr/bin/mcpp in host.def (or add support
for the autoconf build) for this kind of use.

Comment 8 Lorenzo Colitti 2005-10-03 14:42:41 UTC

Originally I had considered detecting the cpp binary at compile time, but then
if it were uninstalled xrdb would break completely, which is even worse.

With the runtime check, it just works if mcpp (or any other compiler you want to
put into the list) is present, and falls back gracefully if not.

Comment 9 Erik Andren 2006-04-18 05:10:12 UTC

Added patch keyword

Comment 10 Daniel Stone 2006-06-03 02:16:43 UTC

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339683 blocks this: it makes
mcpp useless for xrdb without that patch, which seems to be seriously bitrotting.

Comment 11 Daniel Stone 2007-02-27 01:27:51 UTC

Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys.  Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.

Comment 12 Jerome Warnier 2007-12-16 13:42:10 UTC

I originally wrote a patch for startup scripts instead of build-time.
See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=343828.

Comment 13 Matt Turner 2010-12-03 12:55:41 UTC

Patch doesn't apply. Bug is totally inactive. Closing.

If you want to revive this, please send a patch to xorg-devel@lists.x.org.

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