Intel Rejects Supporting Ubuntu's XMir 205
An anonymous reader writes "Just days after Intel added XMir support to their Linux graphics driver so it would work with the in-development the X11 compatibility layer to the Mir display server premiering with Ubuntu 13.10, Intel management has rejected the action and had the XMir patch reverted. There's been controversy surrounding Mir with it competing with Wayland and the state of the display server being rather immature and its performance coming up short while it will still debut in Ubuntu 13.10. Intel management had to say, "We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream." As a result, Canonical will need to ship their own packaged version of the Intel (and AMD and Nouveau drivers) with out-of-tree patches."
Re:Monopolist acts anticompetetively, film at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Layering? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm honestly not super clear myself! But the DDX is, as I understand it, the in-Xorg portion of the graphics driver. So I guess it's not unreasonable that that component needs to know it's not got complete control of the hardware, as opposed to the Xorg-only case where it would have. Presumably it needs to proxy some operations through Mir (or Wayland, for XWayland) that it'd normally just set directly.
A *bit* like running X under X using Xnest or Xephyr, though I'd imagine it's less extreme than that (since those, I'd guess, have to issue X-level drawing commands to their host X server, whereas to get graphics under Wayland/Mir they'd just render to a memory buffer like any Wayland/Mir client).
All slightly speculative since I'm not familiar with the in-depth technical details!
Re:That is why Linux wont win the desktop (Score:1, Interesting)
Windows 2000 can run drivers from XP and even Windows Server 2003. Yours break during a simple patch or a distro update.
I used to own a mom popIT business and customers would always return later after an update as their screens would go black due to X or an ati driver breaking. Switch them to Windows and the problem goes away.
I don' t understand how you think this is a good thing? Linux is foss so drivers will never not be supported unlike other oses. I think you assume your printer will always work. How do you know a driver will work during an update or distro upgrade?
Nvidia uses a hack to get around this.
Re: That is why Linux wont win the desktop (Score:2, Interesting)
Glad someone made this comment, because I was about to. I used to work at MS in the Windows division. I saw this first hand and close up: every release, lots of drivers broke. As far as I am concerned the folks complaining about Linux's lack of stable driver interfaces are completely clueless whiners. They have no clue what goes into writing drivers on any platform. The only reason you can generally get drivers that work on all recent versions of Windows is because the hardware vendors are forced to port and maintain them due to MS's historical monopoly.