X Font Server

Current status

The use of server-side fonts is currently considered deprecated in favour of client-side fonts.

For the few cases in which server-side fonts are still needed, the new servers have their own integrated font renderer, so that no external one is needed. Server-side fonts can now be configured in the X server configuration files. For example, /etc/X11/xorg.conf will set the server-side fonts for

No specification on client-side fonts is given in the core protocol.

Future

As of October 2006, the manpage for xfs on Debian states that:

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Significant further development of xfs is unlikely. One of the original motivations behind xfs was the single-threaded nature of the X server — a user’s X session could seem to "freeze up" while the X server took a moment to rasterize a font. This problem with the X server (which remains single-threaded in all popular implementations to this day) has been mitigated on two fronts: machines have gotten much faster, and client-side font rendering (particularly via the Xft library) has become the norm in contemporary software.

Deployment issues

So the choice between local filesystem font access and xfs-based font access is purely a local deployment choice. It does not make much sense in a single computer scenario.

See also