I don't mind if it exists on the Pi, so long as X is still an option. I use the remote desktop facilities X provides even more with Pis than with any other platform, and to the best of my knowledge, Wayland doesn't have anything like that.
Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
81–90 of 259 posts
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I'm no expert but I believe there are actually two different notions of hardware acceleration at play here: 1) HW accelerated rendering in Firefox, which despite being unfortunately disabled by default on linux can in my experience be enabled (on about:config) without issues. This makes the experience of scrolling much smoother, so I usually do that. I don't think this has any observable effect on battery life for…
I've used chromium-vaapi on Linux with some success. I don't think those patches have been accepted in upstream chromium though.
I may give that a shot, although I think chromium still requires XWayland, right?
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#83I totally feel this guy's pain. When I started at Sun there was a 'direct to framebuffer' window system which we called "Suntools" It was fast and pretty much all in the kernel and pretty awesome, except this new thing "X11" allowed you to have a big beefy machine (sort of a Raspi 3 equivalent today :-)) with its fans and noise in some machine room while the display and input was on your desk. There were even people who made things they called "X terminals" which were instant on devices that provided the display, mouse, Etc. Sun switched over to X11 and the UNIX windows wars began.
When the SparcStation I came out, I backported Suntools to its frame buffer on a lark and it was screaming fast. That was pretty fun.
Oddly enough, I still use X11 a lot. I have probably half a dozen ARM systems around my office/lab doing various things, and it is simpler to run an X11 client locally and just kick off an xterm to these machines than it is to try to do some sort of KVM nonsense. It is also more capable than running a web server on the Pi and trying to interact with it via web "application" pages.
Oddly enough, I recently (like about 6 months ago) became aware of "KVM over IP" which, believe it or not, you hook this piece of hardware to the display port (or HDMI) and the USB port, and it sends the video (and HDMI audio), out over the network to a purpose built application on a remote system. Wow, sounds just like X11 but without the willing participation of the OS vendor :-).
The point I'm trying to make is there absolutely is a need for both. A direct to the metal way of cutting out layers and layers of abstraction so that you can just render to the screen in a timely way, with support for UI features. (otherwise we'd just program to Unity or Vulkan and be done). But their also needs to be a standardized way of letting "well behaved" programs export their graphics and I/O across the network to a place more convenient for the user.
Arguing passionately for one use case at the expense of the other doesn't move the ball down the road. Instead it just pits one chunk of the user base against the other half.
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#84Meh. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland is strictly inferior to X, so long as it fails to support network transparency / remoting. Talk to me when they have a real solution for this, besides VNC or supporting RDP.
Xorg remoting was poorly designed to accomodate DRI/DRM, video card acceleration and had adequate performance to only display primitives on screen. Thats the reasons of poor Xorg remoting adoption. I dont remember seeing anyone in this decade using it - it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp.
> it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp.
Those solutions don't do what X remote desktop does, though. Namely, those let you share a desktop rather than providing independent remote desktops.
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#85Thanks for this great primer! Not quite through with the article, but I've recently been using my Raspberry Pi as a workstation (I mostly use SSH anyway), and I've had issues / confusion with hardware acceleration and X vs. Wayland for a long time.
I never seem to be able to get hardware acceleration to work properly in Linux on my MacBook---whenever I open up a webpage, CPU usage goes through the roof, unlike in Mac OS. Wayland seems to help a bit, but there seem to be lots of bugs than can only be fixed by the window manager.
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xorg remoting was poorly designed to accomodate DRI/DRM, video card acceleration and had adequate performance to only display primitives on screen. Thats the reasons of poor Xorg remoting adoption. I dont remember seeing anyone in this decade using it - it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp.
I've not seen anyone using VNC or remote Xorg for years. Is it really that important these days?
Remote Xorg is important to me. I use it pretty much daily. I use VNC as well, but less often.
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
RDP has had remote app for a long time now, which is essentially the same thing: run program on remote machine, forward its window to local.
Interesting, I've never heard of that facility before. I guess it wasn't promoted very heavily? Or maybe it's just because RDP comes from the MS world and I try very hard to avoid Windows and anything Windows-centric unless forced to. Anyway, thanks for sharing that. I'll look into it. Here's some info on RemoteApp for anybody else who's interested. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Enterprise-Mobility-S... http…
> Or maybe it's just because RDP comes from the MS world and I try very hard to avoid Windows and anything Windows-centric unless forced to.
It'll be due to that.
For the most part it works really well, though still not flawless after all these years.
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#88I totally feel this guy's pain. When I started at Sun there was a 'direct to framebuffer' window system which we called "Suntools" It was fast and pretty much all in the kernel and pretty awesome, except this new thing "X11" allowed you to have a big beefy machine (sort of a Raspi 3 equivalent today :-)) with its fans and noise in some machine room while the display and input was on your desk. There were even people…
Funny you'd mention that: I was just comparing a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 1990 SS2, which totally skunks it 86:1!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717416
>How many more times faster is a typical smartphone today (Raspberry Pi 3: 2,451 MIPS, ARM Cortex A73: 71,120 MIPS) that a 1990 SparcStation 2 pizzabox (28.5 MIPS, $15,000-$27,000)?
Remember "2^(year-1984)"?
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mil...
On Nov 8, 2018, I sent Bill Joy a birthday greeting: "Happy 17,179,869,184 MIPS Birthday, Bill"! (2 to the (year - 1984))
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#89I enjoyed the article but this quote jumped out at me: "What took thirty years to build isn't going to be replaced in a day." This was in regard to replacing X11 with Wayland. It's funny because it would be closer to the truth to say that X11 took 5 years to build, and for the last 25 years everyone has been trying to get off of it, but in the meantime piling more stuff on top of it since that's easier than starting…
I've been reading through the Vulkan spec, which is in way similar in that OpenGL has been extended since its introduction in 1992 with more and more features to support new graphics capabilities as they evolved. I've seen Vulkan called the successor to OpenGL, but reading the spec it seems more like the end game for raster graphics card programming. OpenGL 4.0 was released in 2010, and since then changes have been i…
Qt Widgets is an amazing library, but honestly it is both more and less featureful than it needs to be in various cases. The rich text document stuff still holds up OK for basic cases, but I think the text rendering story could be a bit better. Last time I was doing low level text stuff in Qt, performance was not super impressive, and some of the APIs left a bit to be desired.
Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)
#90Meh. As far as I'm concerned, Wayland is strictly inferior to X, so long as it fails to support network transparency / remoting. Talk to me when they have a real solution for this, besides VNC or supporting RDP.
Xorg remoting was poorly designed to accomodate DRI/DRM, video card acceleration and had adequate performance to only display primitives on screen. Thats the reasons of poor Xorg remoting adoption. I dont remember seeing anyone in this decade using it - it hands down lost to vnc/nx and rdp.
DRI/DRM makes the assumption that your GPU is plugged in the one and only machine hosting all your apps. This wasn't that crazy in 1998, but today the GPU is under my desk while myriad app hosts are racked in datacenters (where a GPU might be an expensive addon, but probably doesn't exist) and good remoting is so neglected that the industry is using web browsers as display servers to fill the gap.