125482 - RFE: Support for several X11 displays (at the same time)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, enhancement)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

Mozilla should be able to support several X11 displays at the same time (e.g.,
to use it on several machines where only one has Mozilla). The only current
solution would be to start two different processes with two different profiles
(and two different DISPLAY values).

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

blizzard, is it feasible to do this via XRemote?  Does GTK even allow this sort
of thing, or would this only be doable in the Xlib port?

Comment 2

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

Gtk is a one display horse, sorry.

Comment 3

[timeless]

ok, so that leaves Qt, and xlib. 

Comment 4

[Roland Mainz]

Xlib toolkit supports multiple displays (at least one framebuffer server
(Xsun/XFree86) and one print server (Xprt)).

But nsFontMetricsXlib.cpp and some other places are full of global/static vars
(Xprint code therefore has a copy of nsFontMetricsXlib.cpp in it's own module,
avoiding this issue) - we would have to sweep&&clean-up the crap first (that's
bug 119491) ...

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Reassigning to an owner who's likely to either work on this or know who may plan
to, and confirming.

(that said, this one feels like [e-mail] wants it...)

Comment 6

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 193390 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Roland Mainz]

bug 187125 ("GTK+ and Xlib gfx should support multiple device instances") added
support for handing two sepetate X11 devices to the X11 toolkit...
... do you have any idea how we can now handle this kind of support from the
upper levels in Mozilla (e.g. layout/ and user interface) ?

----

Remaining ToDo list (except the issues listed above):
- gfx/src/xlib/nsImageXlib.cpp still has globals (looks we have to pass the
nsIDeviceContext reference around to avoid confusion and/or add a proxy object
to handle rendering the same image on different Xservers)
- widget/src/xlib/ has some global vars

Comment 8

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

It should be possible to do this with the gtk2 code, assuming that we want to
require gtk 2.2.  It supports multiple displays now.

Comment 9

[JT Moree]

What is the status on this?  Has Moz or Firefox started using a newer gtk? Can
this be fixed?  AS more and more people start to use dual head setups this will
become even more of a nuisance.

Comment 11

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

It's obsoleted now.