Frame – the first Linux Assembly X server

(isene.org)

48 points | by guybedo 3 hours ago

13 comments

  • adrian_b 18 minutes ago
    When first looking at the source code, I wondered why one would waste so much time to write 25k lines in raw assembly language, but then I saw that it was generated with Claude, for whom it does not matter much how expanded is the written text.

    If someone had written this program manually, the strategy would have been very different. With a good macro-assembler (and nasm is good enough) one should define a great number of macros, to encapsulate all the tedious boilerplate, especially for things like function prologues, epilogues and invocations.

    With a well written macro library, an assembly program can be almost as compact as a C program, instead of containing many text lines for each equivalent high-level language statement.

    Such an assembly source with good macros can be read and understood much more easily than raw assembly language, like in this "frame.asm".

    Otherwise, this is interesting work.

    • tty456 11 minutes ago
      Sounds like another prompt is in order to re-write the code
  • pjmlp 0 minutes ago
    Up voting as it kind of makes the point I believe in, regarding how this AI powered tooling eventually will land on.

    COBOL and 4 GL dreams coming into reality.

  • ToyKeeper 44 minutes ago
    It's funny to see someone using a LLM as a compiler, making it convert higher-level operations into assembly, instead of just using a compiler.
    • pjmlp 2 minutes ago
      Eventually that will be the way, revenge of COBOL and 4GLs.
  • fhn 10 minutes ago
    Was browsing some of the other rust projects(https://isene.org/fe2o3/#tools) and https://github.com/isene/torii says "Mozilla removed Firefox's "Open network login page" banner". I'm on windows and still see the banner so don't know if this is true. Is the really true on Linux?
  • spikk 9 minutes ago
    I wonder if very cheap code generation will make software monocultures less relevant here. Because lots of incompatible devices is awful to work with, security stuff may also hurt
  • yjftsjthsd-h 1 hour ago
    I am loving the shift from 'X11 is too big and messy to ever reimplement' to 'there are multiple wildly different X servers being built from scratch'.

    Also, has anyone run it successfully? I got as far as building and running with --display and then running `DISPLAY=:7 dwm` and `DISPLAY=:7 alacritty`, but I can't seem to focus the window to actually type. Given that the author posted a picture of the thing actually running a live environment and claims to actually be using it, I'm pretty sure this is a me problem but I haven't been able to figure out where it is. Mouse works, too.

    • Kelteseth 16 minutes ago
      > 'there are multiple wildly different X servers being built from scratch'

      by claude code. So this was only possible since no human had to bear looking at X original source code.

    • bogdan 14 minutes ago
      Try running `tile` as a wm. I imagine it's not fully compliant to support dwm.
  • NetOpWibby 15 minutes ago
    Beautiful. Using LLMs to create perfect tools for yourself is my favorite thing about them.

    No dependencies and better performance? Fantastic.

  • elendilm 12 minutes ago
    <I am not sure this laptop has a fan anymore. Except me.>

    I wish mine had no fan too except me.

  • mintflow 1 hour ago
    this is impressive, even with claude i think the guy have enough deep understanding of the OS and the varioius topic make it works

    recently i also rewrite most of the app's underlying core function to rust, just like the guy do for the phone

    perhaps i should also do more stuffs given codex reset too quickly

  • Tiberium 1 hour ago
    Was there a reason to add an AI-generated image to the top of the article? :(
    • stonogo 1 hour ago
      The article about an AI-generated X11 server? Why not?
      • mikepavone 48 minutes ago
        Article reads like it was AI-generated too
  • system7rocks 1 hour ago
    Interesting.

    I've never quite found that Linux is more optimized on battery-powered machines for energy savings, even though supposedly there is a lot of room to tweak and optimize settings -- from selecting a low resource window manager/DE to turning off various services to switching up power management utilities. But this does seem like an approach that might produce that kind of fruit?

    • cogman10 42 minutes ago
      The really unfortunate thing about linux is the defaults tend to be not battery friendly.

      For example, I recently got another 1 hour out of my old laptop's battery because I didn't realize for the intel video card driver I needed to add some modprobe flags to get it to load up a firmware binary blob. Doing that enabled hardware video decoding, faster performance, and lower power usage.

      There's a bunch of setting like this that you need to make sure are turned on to get the best battery performance. Some OSes are better about toggling them than others and mine (gentoo) let's you discover later that you forgot to turn them on :).

      • fhn 13 minutes ago
        That's really sad to hear. I think it's just so much to configure for any human to take on. I'm going to run my system config through an LLM and have it optimize it for me see if that works.
      • inigyou 18 minutes ago
        I have a laptop where you need to load a certain driver to turn off the discrete GPU, which triples the idle battery life.
      • exe34 21 minutes ago
        Hey could you tell me about this flag please? I have an intel gpu and might need it too!
    • c0balt 1 hour ago
      You might want to take a look at TLP[0]. It, among other things, backs the power mode/profile panels in Gnome/KDE.

      Many distros already try to push good defaults, but you can do a whole lot when optimizing for a mobile experience. You can also do some fun stuff with it, like running a script[1] when going from ac->bat power to, e.g., turn of a service, lower refresh rate or reduce brightness.

      [0]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html [1]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/usage/run-on.html#run-on-ac-run-on-...

  • ConanRus 58 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • vinceguidry 1 hour ago
    Vidar wrote one in pure Ruby.

    https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11

    • yjftsjthsd-h 1 hour ago
      At a glance, that looks like an X client library, not an X server?
      • vinceguidry 58 minutes ago
        Ah! You're right, I had read somewhere that he'd implemented his own X windows but I suppose I was mistaken.