X Testing Software
This page provides infomation on various tools to aid the testing ( and to a degree, debugging ) of X Servers and Clients.
Please add anything I've missed that you find useful.
General Testing/Debugging Tools ( Not X specific )
gdb
GNU interactive debugger.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/gdb.html
gcov, gprof
Code coverage and profiling. Part of the GCC compiler collection.
valgrind
Valgrind is a GPL'd system for debugging and profiling x86-Linux ( and now powerpc ? ) programs. Very useful for trapping memory leaks.
X Server Testing
rendercheck
EricAnholt 's program for testing server render acceleration correctness. In initial development, available from fd.o git "xapps/rendercheck/"
Xtest suite
Old MIT based Test Suite for testing conformance of ported servers.
builds for me via xmkmf, . ./build.sh. Have no idea how to run it.
ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/xtest/
( also see http://www.opengroup.org/testing/testsuites/vsw5.htm )
A slightly updated version of the old test suite with build instruction can be found here: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/XorgTesting
x11perf
Tests performance of most ( non render ext ) X operations.
Available packaged in most distributions.
Misc
I did some tests measuring blit speeds with kdrive on various ARM based handhelds. The results of which are available here;
http://handhelds.org/~mallum/fullscreen/
X Client Testing
Client X servers ( or X clients that are servers )
XSDL, Xnest
- Both of these provide servers that run on an existing X server. Useful for window manager development or 'emulation' of a different sized
display. Both are available in git. Xnest is mature and stable but lacks support for 'modern' X extensions ( such as render and composite ), whilst Xsdl supports these extensions but is a fairly immature application.
Xnest is also available packaged in most distributions.
Xephyr
- Xephyr is a kdrive based X Server which targets a window on a host X Server as its framebuffer.
See Software/Xephyr
Server side resource leaks
xrestop
- Provides realtime 'top' like statistics of each clients resource usage in the server.
EWMH/ICCCM compliance
Window manager tools.
matchbox & metacity window manager source both contain various tools to generate 'dummy' windows with particular properties.
http://matchbox.handhelds.org ( grab matchbox-tests )
xprop
- Command line tool to inspect window properties. Available packaged for most distributions.
wininfo
- New nice window inspection tool with GTK GUI and EWMH hint 'aware'.
Protocol usage / events
xev
- xev displays the contents on events recieved by its window. Available packaged for most distributions.
xmon
- xmon is an 'interactive X protocol monitor'. It acts as a proxy between a server and clients and provides configurable infomation on the traffic passing through it. Available packaged for most distributions. ( apt-get install xmon on Debian )
Also see
- Keith Packards 'X Window System Network Performance' paper;
http://freedesktop.org/~keithp/talks/usenix2003/html/net.html Kenton Lees 'Debugging X Input Events';
Automating Usage
Xnee
- Xnee is a suite of programs that can record and replay X events. This allows user interaction to be recorded and played back. Xnee can be used as a monitor, to 'retype' a file and to distribute events. Xnee can record all data in the X11 protocol.
Misc
matchbox-nest
- 'matchbox nest' is a graphical wrapper around xnest. Its intended for embedded developers that want to simulate a target device ( with display, buttons ) on a desktop machine.
-- MatthewAllum - 09 Jun 2004