XLIB Programming Manual, Rel. 5, Third Edition

C.5 Writing Extension Stubs

All X requests always contain the length of the request, expressed as a 16-bit quantity of 32 bits. This means that a single request can be no more than 256K bytes in length. Some servers may not support single requests of such a length. The value of dpy->max_request_size contains the maximum length as defined by the server implementation. For further information, see “X Window System Protocol.”

C.5.1 Requests, Replies, and Xproto.h

The <Xproto.h> file contains three sets of definitions that are of interest to the stub implementor: request names, request structures, and reply structures.

You need to generate a file equivalent to <Xproto.h> for your extension and need to include it in your stub routine. Each stub routine also must include <Xlibint.h>.

The identifiers are deliberately chosen in such a way that, if the request is called X_DoSomething, then its request structure is xDoSomethingReq, and its reply is xDoSomethingReply. The GetReq family of macros, defined in <Xlibint.h>, takes advantage of this naming scheme.

For each X request, there is a definition in <Xproto.h> that looks similar to this:

#define X_DoSomething   42

In your extension header file this will be a minor opcode, rather than a major opcode.

C.5.2 Request Format

Every request contains an 8-bit major opcode and a 16-bit length field expressed in units of four bytes. Every request consists of four bytes of header (containing the major opcode, the length field, and a data byte) followed by zero ...