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Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

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Re: Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

#81

Post by Cogito »

raldi wrote: post #76

Can someone summarize the story in a way that doesn't presuppose prior knowledge of what Mir or XMir is, and who isn't familiar with the Ubuntu-Intel history? Free karma if you do!

== Backstory ==

The X Window System (known as X11 - 11th version) is currently the predominant way for Linux users to use a graphical interface, specifically a windowed interface.

It is old and was designed for a purpose that doesn't match current usage nor technology. For this reason, a number of projects have risen to replace X11.

'Wayland' is the best supported of these projects, whilst 'Mir' is similar but has much less support. Mir was started specifically for Ubuntu, and has caused significant controversy in the community.

Until these new projects are completed, and in order to support legacy software written for X, bridges that allow X11 compatible software to run on Wayland or Mir have been created. These are called XWayland and XMir respectively.

== Current Story ==

The open source Intel drivers support X11, and increasingly will support Wayland (not sure on current state of this).

Canonical wrote a patchset that adds support for Mir to the Intel drivers, and requested that this be included in the main Intel project.

Intel has, for seemingly political reasons, denied that request. Canonical will thus have to maintain the patches themselves (it is common for many distributions to maintain patchsets in this way). If anyone else wanted to use Mir, and use Canonical's XMir bridge, they would need to source it from Canonical directly rather than from the main Intel repository.

It seems that Intel doesn't want to support multiple new windowing projects, and has backed Wayland over Mir (as have many others in the community).

Re: Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

#82

Post by synchronise »

Daishiman wrote: post #72
stelonix wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to convey the fact that you need something like JACK in order to do real time audio DSP, while in Windows/Mac, it just works. More importantly, in 2013, per-application volume control should be a given. It's possible under Pulse AFAIK, just not under ALSA. It may not represent the typical Linux users, but while audio processing also doesn't represent the typical PC user, it works under mainstream operating…

> I'm trying to convey the fact that you need something like JACK in order to do real time audio DSP, while in Windows/Mac, it just works. There's a ton of Windows applications that take over audio and do a lot of driver weirdness. There's still ASIO incompatibilies, latency issues, etc. In fact it happens in the same space where PulseAudio and JACK intersect on Windows.

Having something that just works similar to the way CoreAudio just works would be a killer feature to have in Linux. Instead, we get ALSA and Pulseaudio, the odd couple of audio interfaces.

Re: Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

#83

Post by synchronise »

ginko wrote: post #24
toyg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what is stopping NVidia and AMD from cooperating on Wayland right now ? When you look at it from this perspective, a shadowy doubt is cast over Canonical's motivations.

This is the part that irritates me most about Mir: By rolling their own display server, Canonical has set back efforts to get all display vendors on board for supporting Wayland. If Ubuntu would have switched used Wayland (along with the other distributions), there would have been a very strong incentive for all vendors to support this in their drivers.

If this were the case, then why is a large swathe of proprietary drivers supporting only Surfaceflinger?

If it's the most popular display framework in terms of use, then why not simply make it the default? Not Wayland nor X11 could garner the numbers required to overtake SF.

Re: Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

#84

Post by synchronise »

gph wrote: post #77
synchronise wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apostasy needs to be punished, that's 21st century thinking right there.

If Linux is ever to become mainsteam the way OSX and Windows are then 'apostasy' needs not be accommodated. Now you can debate whether the philosophy of the Linux and open-source community is for creating a standardized product that can be easily adopted and used by the mainstream user-base. But for companies like Intel, I understand why they want to push it in that direction.

Linux already is mainstream, just look at the success that Android has had.

And there are still competing frameworks out there that are objectively better than the decided on counterparts.

ALSA replaced OSS, then OSS4 came out. The latter is more stable and can do more things than the former can do alone, such as per application volume controls, yet it's only used in the BSD sphere.

Likewise, OpenRC is a great replacement for SysVinit without changing the overall structure of the init system, unlike systemd which attempts to consolidate all of those parts into 'optional' modules that other projects are making compulsory e.g. Gnome Shell has a hard dependency on systemd as logind cannot be used alone any more, not to mention the large changes to the init design.

Re: Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

#86

Post by raldi »

Cogito wrote: post #81
raldi wrote: post #76

Can someone summarize the story in a way that doesn't presuppose prior knowledge of what Mir or XMir is, and who isn't familiar with the Ubuntu-Intel history? Free karma if you do!

== Backstory == The X Window System (known as X11 - 11th version) is currently the predominant way for Linux users to use a graphical interface, specifically a windowed interface. It is old and was designed for a purpose that doesn't match current usage nor technology. For this reason, a number of projects have risen to replace X11. 'Wayland' is the best supported of these projects, whilst 'Mir' is similar but has mu…

That was spectacular, thanks -- everyone give this guy some karma!

Re: Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

#87

Post by raldi »

SEJeff wrote: post #80
raldi wrote: post #76

Can someone summarize the story in a way that doesn't presuppose prior knowledge of what Mir or XMir is, and who isn't familiar with the Ubuntu-Intel history? Free karma if you do!

X.org is an ancient beast that works, but is creaky. Intel has really been leading the charge to develop a new display server named Wayland. After much publicity from none other than Mark Shuttleworth about how Ubuntu was going to adopt Wayland, they decided to write their own display server from scratch named XMir. They want to use the same code for Ubuntu on phones, desktops, tablets. Intel doesn't much care to sup…

I really appreciate your well-written reply. May it receive a multitude of points.

Re: Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

#88

Post by SEJeff »

raldi wrote: post #87
SEJeff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X.org is an ancient beast that works, but is creaky. Intel has really been leading the charge to develop a new display server named Wayland. After much publicity from none other than Mark Shuttleworth about how Ubuntu was going to adopt Wayland, they decided to write their own display server from scratch named XMir. They want to use the same code for Ubuntu on phones, desktops, tablets. Intel doesn't much care to sup…

I really appreciate your well-written reply. May it receive a multitude of points.

Thanks! I've added two technical articles with reasonings why Wayland and some technical reasoning to back that up.
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