Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

joshondesign.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 259 posts

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#221

Post by quink »

DonHopkins wrote: post #119
jolmg wrote: post #93

Can I just say that I think it's great that we now ceased to have a monoculture in display servers for Unix-based systems? It was the last one, I believe. I mean, we've had choices for text-editors, for shells, for programming languages, for GUI toolkits, for desktop environments, for window managers, for remote-desktop servers and viewers, for ssl/tls implementations, for web browsers, and even for kernels. The only…

Why not just use a full screen direct-to-hardware web browser as the window manager, and talk to clients, servers and other screens via HTTP, WebSockets, two-way streaming video and screen sharing via RTP, etc? The reason X-Windows sucks is that it's not extensible, and Wayland is only incrementally and quantitatively better than X11 (like X12 or Y), not radically and qualitatively better (like NeWS or AJAX). Wayland…

> The reason X-Windows sucks is that it's not extensible

Years of configuring modules in XF86Config and matching things up between the server and the client and that thankfully going away quite a bit with Xorg would make my conclusion the opposite and yet also suggests it didn’t really matter as much.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#222

Post by kiwijamo »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #174
michaelmrose wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero reason to suppose that the reason people don't use linux is X11.

Sure there is, starting with the difficulty in setting up, getting it to output the correct resolution with your monitor, correct refresh rate, etc..

It has worked automaticlly for me for the last decade using different distros and the *BSDs. I do remember all that trouble though when I started experimenting with Linux/BSD in the early 2000s.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#223

Post by mrlambchop »

mycall wrote: post #214
mrlambchop wrote: post #188

Woah - a huge flash to the past when I read this. I ported Wayland to VideoCore4 (the multimedia engine in first Pi chip) back in 2011 - it was part of the Meltemi Nokia project that got cancelled the follow year - shame as it was pretty cool and had half a chance IMO. We worked with the team in Oslo on QT acceleration over GL ES and used EGL below Wayland (coupled with some magic APIs to get the VideoCore HVS to wor…

If you connected with Eric Anhold and worked on this, you would help millions of Pi students and users. It is an opportunity.

I checked out Eric's work just - he's doing an amazing job! Much more thought put into the subject (security for GLSL being a huge topic on its own). The lack of MMU in the VC4 architecture is a huge pain point that probably sucks up most engineering cycles when it comes to arbitrary application environments using GPU resources like X11 or Wayland - when memory runs out, what to do? You can throw engineering resources at it, but engineering talent really needs access to VMCS on the VideoCore side todo any worth while work.

When we ported Android to the VC4 architecture the first time (~2010), the low memory killer in Linux was subverted to understand to kill Android applications based on their use of the VideoCore GPU memory and it worked pretty well, yet it would still close the primary running app once in a while. Run monkey over Android and all hell broke loose - really tough situations to defensively code fore. For example, for CX reasons, you had to ignore some GLES errors in the primary client due to low memory, then the system had to kill another application that was using the memory, then it would kill the EGL context for the primary application so it would refresh the entire app lifecycle using an almost suspect code path inside Android. Good times! Imagine Wayload has very similar challenges for normal desktop use.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#224

Post by wander_homer »

p2t2p wrote: post #201
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until everyone else creates their own standard protocols.

Nah, those protocols are also implemented in wl-roots which is the foundation of virtually every single wayland compositor, otherwise you'd have to write 50+k of lines of code yourself.

Only if you ignore the most widely used Wayland compositors on the desktop, Mutter and Kwin. I doubt all compositors built upon wlroots come even close to the user bases of those two.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#225

Post by flohofwoe »

0xfaded wrote: post #67
mwfunk wrote: post #9

I 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…

I think/hope the "endgame" for 3D APIs is that they disappear completely into compilers. Vulkan still has too many compromises and design warts to support different GPU architectures from high- to low-end and is already more complex than GL ever was after 25 years of development (just look at the huge extension list that already exists for Vulkan).

I don't need an "CPU API" to run code on the CPU in my machine, so why do I need to go through an API to run code on the GPU (hint: it's mostly about GPU makers protecting their IP).

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#227

Post by ahje »

petepete wrote: post #11
altmind wrote: post #3

Earlier 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?

Is X over SSH that important? Not really. Is it handy enough for me to use it on a daily basis? Yes, without a doubt!

Everyone has a different use case though. I could just as well be using RemoteApp or something along those lines.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#228

Post by imtringued »

flohofwoe wrote: post #225
0xfaded wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think/hope the "endgame" for 3D APIs is that they disappear completely into compilers. Vulkan still has too many compromises and design warts to support different GPU architectures from high- to low-end and is already more complex than GL ever was after 25 years of development (just look at the huge extension list that already exists for Vulkan). I don't need an "CPU API" to run code on the CPU in my machine, so wh…

The irony is that the Raspberry Pi is basically a GPU chip with some small CPU cores tacked on. So you yes you actually need the GPU API to run code on the CPU.

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#229

Post by stefan_ »

mrlambchop wrote: post #223
mycall wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you connected with Eric Anhold and worked on this, you would help millions of Pi students and users. It is an opportunity.

I checked out Eric's work just - he's doing an amazing job! Much more thought put into the subject (security for GLSL being a huge topic on its own). The lack of MMU in the VC4 architecture is a huge pain point that probably sucks up most engineering cycles when it comes to arbitrary application environments using GPU resources like X11 or Wayland - when memory runs out, what to do? You can throw engineering resource…

The open source driver doesn't use VMCS, it instead puts aside a fixed block of memory (typically 256 MiB, which I think is also a limit due to some hardware bugs) for use through the Linux Contiguous Memory Allocator (CMA) that it then draws from.

VMCS only comes into the picture if you use video decode, but I think Dave Stevenson from the foundation hacked the firmware side to support importing Linux allocated memory blocks into VMCS so that you can do zero-copy decode and import into EGL (or more likely HVS, the EGL support for the formats is pretty limited).

(I really liked the design of the HVS - having pretty much scripted planes is a fresh approach over similar hardware blocks that have a fixed number of planes each with own idiosyncracies and limitations)

Re: Why don't we have Wayland on Raspberry Pi yet? (2018)

#230

Post by imtringued »

hollerith wrote: post #99
cbdumas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running Arch, which I find to be the most frictionless when you're trying to do sort of "bleeding edge" stuff like this.

It is time for me to give desktop Linux another try (which will be my first serious try in 10 years).

Don't.... You will waste a big chunk of time on playing windows games on linux....
Post reply on HN