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Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

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Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#111

Post by qjz »

loewenskind wrote: post #88
thingie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's an X server, in fact :-) It uses the parts of X server that were moved to the kernel in the last year or two (KMS, large part of graphic drivers). Wayland itself is very small, you can look into the source code to find anything you want to know, it's all there, easy to find. That's the good thing, perhaps, breaking that large and ugly X thing into small parts that we can easily understand, check, improve.…

Neither OSX nor Windows use X and both of them look much nicer. In my opinion the last 20 years of X were a mistake that should have been aborted a long time ago. Both Windows and OSX do remote desktop just fine for the minority who need it.

I guess I'm a minority of that minority, in that I love X for its ability to run single applications remotely over the network. Neither Windows nor OSX do this well (if at all). Frankly, I don't want a whole desktop when I can just run the desired application in its own window(s), well integrated with the platform I happen to be on at the moment. Currently, most Linux distributions support this out of the box, and it's easy enough to install Cygwin on Windows or XQuartz on OSX. Hopefully, this will still be possible under Wayland.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#112

Post by akho »

krschultz wrote: post #53
pilom wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is certainly not too big to ignore. I have never seen any source say Linux (let alone Ubuntu) has more than 5% marketshare. Does your company support 800x600? How about IE6?

That 5% number is meaningless. Lets start with what percent of all people who own computers have a Nvidia graphics card. Considering that the mass bulk of computers have a crappy integrated chipset, and there is also ATI/AMD out there, I can safely say Among those 50% what percent are Linux users? Wouldn't it be expected the kind of people enthused enough to buy a discrete graphics card are also the kind of people wi…

No, it wouldn’t. Gamers buy discrete cards. Gamers do not use Linux.

(In fact, I’m having trouble coming up with a reason for a desktop Linux user to buy a discrete graphics card)

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#113

Post by FooBarWidget »

loewenskind wrote: post #86
FooBarWidget wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottleneck in X has never been network transparency. Local access has been accelerated through Unix domain sockets and shared memory for as long as I can remember. It looks like Wayland also has a client/server architecture which makes me suspect it's can be made network transparent just like X is.

It does make for a ridiculous API though. No one writes X for this reason, but I suspect it would speed things up a lot if everyone writing for the platform didn't have to go through multiple layers of better APIs to talk to the actual display subsystem.

What API? There is no API, there's a protocol.

Switching from TCP sockets to Unix domain sockets requires changing about 3-4 lines of connect code, but everything else remains the same. You get a lot of localhost performance for free with almost no changes.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#114

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

sielskr wrote: post #78
paol wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago. Within that ecosystem , Ubuntu is too big to ignore.

"NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago." NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?

"NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?"

Yes, I think they are because of contracts with big guys that need Linux on things like supercomputers(almost all of them have linux inside).

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#115

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

rick_2047 wrote: post #38

Just one question, I hear that Wayland is hugely dependent on the latest Graphics cards. So that would mean that ubuntu will no longer be usable by people like me who have moderately old hardware (mine is p4 with on board intel graphics, which are already having problems even with X). I liked how ubuntu was stable on my computer (till around 8.10 I think and 9.04 was not bad). I will miss the compatibility

"So that would mean that ubuntu will no longer be usable by people like me who have moderately old hardware (mine is p4 with on board intel graphics, which are already having problems even with X)"

You will need OpenGL, that's it. You could buy a cheap OpenGL card for your P4 for 10$.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#116

Post by sedachv »

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

This is really stupid and I hope this project fails like all the other "let's replace X!!!" masturbation in the 00s.

There is no evidence offered that involving the compositor in event handling is a performance problem in X (hint: like all the "X is slow because it is networked!" nonsense, it's probably not true). Even if that were true, this doesn't explain why the problem is better solved by starting from scratch rather than extending the Xcomposite extension.

But hey, let's write a new graphics system! We can get wonderful advantages like:

* Removing any hope of network transparency. After all, all I have is one computer and all I do with it is play videogames and watch porn.

* Come up with a new API! Everyone appreciates having to rewrite their libraries and applications to new and incompatible specifications.

* We need backwards-compatibility, so let's REIMPLEMENT ALL OF X! It will be really easy! And bug free!

* Old computers? Who wants to use those? Obviously we're not going to implement drivers for older hardware.

A tell-tale sign that this project is a dead-end is this statement: "rendering library such as OpenGL." OpenGL is not a rendering library, it's a specification. Just like the X protocol is a specification. If you don't understand why that's important, you shouldn't be trying to write a replacement for X.

-----

Ok, nevermind the "no network transparency" part:

"Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers."

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/

This actually looks somewhat reasonable.

(I wanted to post this addendum as a reply instead of editing because the points above characterize why most of the 00s X-replacement projects failed, but HN won't let me)

------

Another edit. This time quoting the FAQ (https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/f...):

"It's a minimal server that lets clients communicate GEM buffers and information about updates to those buffers to a compositor."

"Wayland doesn't get in the business of rendering, it expects the clients to use whatever means they prefer to render data into a GEM buffer and when it's done, inform the Wayland server of the new contents."

"Because we for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models the Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option."

"The problem with X is that... it's X."

"No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients."

This is actually as stupid as I originally thought. Now I really, really want it to fail.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#117

Post by junkbit »

akho wrote: post #112
krschultz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 5% number is meaningless. Lets start with what percent of all people who own computers have a Nvidia graphics card. Considering that the mass bulk of computers have a crappy integrated chipset, and there is also ATI/AMD out there, I can safely say Among those 50% what percent are Linux users? Wouldn't it be expected the kind of people enthused enough to buy a discrete graphics card are also the kind of people wi…

No, it wouldn’t. Gamers buy discrete cards. Gamers do not use Linux. (In fact, I’m having trouble coming up with a reason for a desktop Linux user to buy a discrete graphics card)

Nvidia is really pushing CUDA and OpenCL these days. If you follow the developer conferences the graphics feels like less of a priority to them.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#119

Post by azim »

forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #114
sielskr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago." NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?

"NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?" Yes, I think they are because of contracts with big guys that need Linux on things like supercomputers(almost all of them have linux inside).

Interestingly enough, a lot of developers argue that Nvidia and ATI are in violation of of the GPL by releasing proprietary drivers for Linux. The language is unclear on whether or not the kernel's GPL license extends to kernel loadable modules or not, many say it does.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#120

Post by sedachv »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #33
tumult wrote: post #21

I give this the thumbs-up. I'm not particularly fond of X11. In fact, I suspect it has been holding back GUI on GNU/Linux for a while.

A while ? You must have never read the UNIX-HATERS Handbook ( http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf ), which should be required reading for any unix fan, along with the Plan9 design documents (cat-v.org). In this case, "the X Windows disaster" chapter seems most appropriate. Feel free to ignore the VMS fanboys, though. And yes, I am a dedicated unix (OpenBSD) user.

As much as I love the Unix-Haters handbook, the more I learn about X the more I disagree with that chapter. X's memory consumption is totally reasonable for something that has to manage screen and window buffers (I doubt this proposed project would be any better). Xlib is retarded, but no one is forcing you to use it (esp. now that XCB is here). The old drawing protocol sucked, but XRender is very reasonable.
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