Re: Kernel mode fonts
>Ok lets assume its 1994 and we buy that excuse. Fine but its frigging 20 years later.
And MS have "rewritten the OS" right? right? We've also got brand new versions of applications too?
Load a large document into Word on a multi-core machine and try paging through it quickly while observing how many cores get maxed out.
We should be able to do things quickly now with faster silicon. I'm not sure if its relevant, but I can ssh -X across my network to a core2duo E7500, fire up libreoffice and the experience is very close indeed to my local specced out i7-3930k. The core2 has slower disks and 1/8th of the RAM clocked far slower plus serialisation for the network. I can also ssh -X from my core2duo 2.4Ghz imac (which I believe does X in userspace) across the network and run libreoffice just fine.
I'm not suggesting this is a good solution for gaming, but if userspace rendering was at least the default, set at application launch time or even boot time, there's a whole raft of issues which just go away. If I'm browsing and I suddenly get a request to launch kernel-rendering to read a document, I'll have a clue that something is up.