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Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

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Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#21
post #3

Maybe this means Canonical will focus more on ARM hardware now, which is kind of the point of Mir anyway - to be a lot more efficient on "lower-end" mobile hardware like ARM chips. Can't say I wouldn't like that to happen.

Or Canonical's packagers will just carry on patching the Intel drivers?

That works fine because Intel has open source drivers. Not so much if NVIDIA and AMD decide to only support Wayland.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not about FOSS, it is about one man's vision to circumvent the mainstream developer community. Ubuntu chose to make the transition from pre-configuring Debian and making compiz themes for Gnome to trying its hand at systems-level programming. It would be somewhat self-assured of them to assume that all hardware vendors, who are already heavily invested in Linux, as a platform, would necessarily pick up the sl…

I don't say otherwise, just that Intel as a company is a corporation like any other, with contributions to FOSS also driven by internal politics.

I don't think it's entirely a corporate move here. Free software contributions aren't infinite; if you have $N developers working on integrating support for display servers, then it's simple math that having to support two display servers means that you'll have $N/2 developers working on each, and will therefore get half the work done (and, since they'll probably still have to support X11 for a while, make that $N/3). Ubuntu selfishly forked Mir instead of choosing to try to use Wayland (especially when they had originally committed to using Wayland[1]), so the burden is on them here. It also doesn't help that Canonical employees were using the inclusion of XMir support as political fodder[2].

[1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 [2] https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#23
post #6

According to Phornoix, Chris Wilson of Intel wrote this in a Git commit: We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY Phoronix's link to said commit does not work, so it is hard to infer context. But I would assume that "the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mi…

""the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mir in the first place rather than contributing to Wayland. If that's the case, can't say I really blame Intel." I absolutely blame Intel. Whatever you think about Ubuntu's decision to make their own X server, it is childish to not include working patches for purely political reasons. It's not like Ubuntu is asking Intel to do their work for them. So Canon…

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Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#24
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Canonical's packagers will just carry on patching the Intel drivers?

That works fine because Intel has open source drivers. Not so much if NVIDIA and AMD decide to only support Wayland.

True enough. No support for NVIDIA cards at all in current Ubuntu betas. I think even nouveau was falling back to X compatibility but I might have that wrong. It was sloooow

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#25
post #5

What an awful move. Note that they are deliberately hurting open source software by restricting contributions for a purely political reason. Obviously it will result in an Ubuntu fork of the intel drivers, which will eventually lead to a situation where the only consequence is a more painful workflow for Ubuntu core contributers and early adopters looking for up to date drivers.

I don't see how it's political to let Canonical keep the burden of maintaining code that only they care about...

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#26
post #25
post #5

What an awful move. Note that they are deliberately hurting open source software by restricting contributions for a purely political reason. Obviously it will result in an Ubuntu fork of the intel drivers, which will eventually lead to a situation where the only consequence is a more painful workflow for Ubuntu core contributers and early adopters looking for up to date drivers.

I don't see how it's political to let Canonical keep the burden of maintaining code that only they care about...

Is that what is happening here? Intel's explanation of "The Management" handing down orders doesn't imply technical reasons were the motivation. It's unclear.

If there are technical reasons - like the one you mentioned - let's hear them, they might be valid.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#27
post #18
post #5

What an awful move. Note that they are deliberately hurting open source software by restricting contributions for a purely political reason. Obviously it will result in an Ubuntu fork of the intel drivers, which will eventually lead to a situation where the only consequence is a more painful workflow for Ubuntu core contributers and early adopters looking for up to date drivers.

Ubuntu is creating Mir for political reasons. There's no reason for upstream projects to maintain code that only benefits a single distribution.

Yep, all of their technical reasons have pretty much been debunked. The reason for Mir's existence is mainly about project control. As Matthew Garrett mentions[1], they likely need that control for Ubuntu Phone to be able to relicense the code to keep their hardware partners happy.

[1] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#28
post #8
post #3

Maybe this means Canonical will focus more on ARM hardware now, which is kind of the point of Mir anyway - to be a lot more efficient on "lower-end" mobile hardware like ARM chips. Can't say I wouldn't like that to happen.

It would be smart to focus on ARM as a long-term strategy. There is a huge investment and legacy in x86 but if history is right, ARM will eat up x86 from the bottom-up just like x86 did to the other ISA's.

Of course the ARM future is not all that glorious. The open-source friendly ARM vendors are not that common, most ARM GPUs do not have (1st party) opensource graphics drivers.

Re: Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

#30
post #29

Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-productive? Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.

I do not know this code but the diff, posted elsewhere in this thread, looks more than trivial to me. Such changes tend to have maintenance cost. If the original authors don't care about the functionality and aren't testing it, it's probably not worth keeping, as they may go through great pains to leave it in and still end up breaking it frequently.
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