X.Org Server 1.15 Brings DRI3, Lacks XWayland Support 340
An anonymous reader writes "A belated holiday gift for Linux users is the X.Org Server 1.15 'Egg Nog' release. X.Org Server 1.15 presents new features including DRI3 — a big update to their rendering model — a rewrite of the GLX windowing system code, support for Mesa Mega Drivers, and many bug fixes plus polishing. The release, though, goes without any mainline support for XWayland to ease the adoption of the Wayland Display Server while maintaining legacy X11 application support."
stop developing x and support wayland instead (Score:1, Insightful)
even if you don't agree 100% with the design, you can perhaps help to make it more modular so you can do your own thing inside a common framework, but please, stop supporting that old rust bucket.
if all the people who worked on this ploughed their time into wayland, or other alternatives, we'd be done already...
x is dead, it's not even a challenger in the next game, the only reason it's alive is because nobody has a viable alternative they can use today.....
Re:Good! (Score:2, Insightful)
Its not obvious to me that XWayland and X should (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:stop developing x and support wayland instead (Score:2, Insightful)
X11 is not dead. As you point out, the "next-game challengers" have yet to prove themselves viable. If you want to be relevant today you support the technology that actually exists.
Re:Good! (Score:1, Insightful)
They're almost as bad as sysvinit fans.
As a "sysvinit fan", since that what I grew up on and what I learned first,
fuck you.
or, do the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
If all of the competent people working on Wayland would stop wasting time on it and improve the X server, think how much better it might be.
Wayland lacks absolutely necessary features (true "over the net" and root window access, for example) for a significant number of applications and users. Until it has those, even if only through X emulation, it is simply not ready for use by me, and a lot of people like me.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
CAN WE STOP LINKING TO PHORONIX? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is asking too much for a link to *official* sources? (Hint: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2013-December/002384.html)
Re: Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wayland!
The same group of Prople behind
Gnome3
Pulseaudio
Systemd
Journald
Alienating Udev
Alienating 95% of their Userbase
If you all have so much problems with the ideology of Unix then why do you use a Unix based System. Why don't you move on and create your shabby world elsewhere ? Without causing more damage to ours ?
Re:How well does XWayland work? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Having seen terrible X compatibility layers for Mac OS X and Windows
The OSX X (XQuartz) implementation _is_ xorg-server (currently 1.14.4) - you know, the one used on Linux (with certain OSX specific tweaks to allow non-root mode)
The problems you mention with interoperability are largely down to the core windowing systems being vastly different models. We can argue about which model is correct but the interoperability problems are a side effect of different models - not evidence of a particular model being bad.
I'm not convinced from your descriptions here you quite understand the complexity of the interactions.
> The lack of X has been the main technical drawback Mac OS X has been
> having compared to Linux.
> I'd much rather see Mac OS X catch up with Linux than for Linux to go down
> to the level of Mac OS X.
OSX has vsync based updates, sensible event handling and lots of core library stuff (like the AVFramework) that makes it a pleasure to program compared to XWindows.
The Linux desktop _needs_ to get off X. It's an outdated behemoth with a model that is way out of date. Now you could say "well let's update the model then".
Sure, you can do that. And when you do that, you get Wayland.
Re:or, do the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
It's selfish of you to inflict your view of the world
WTF?
He's done nothing more than you have - post to slashdot. Get off your high horse.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
my knowledge might go a little deeper than yours because I had an interest in computer graphics many years ago. Although I've not got a perfect understanding, I'm probably more right than wrong (or somebody here will tell me otherwise and we can both learn a thing or two).
but ultimately, the way that people write high performance graphics stacks now favours compositing and graphics cards require to do a lot of direct accesses in order to make that happen as fast as possible, you have a region of memory and it's mapped to a location somewhere in the gpu memory and you just blast it with data, you can't have too many processes in the middle here, so thats why we need a DRM (direct rendering manager) to basically give x a direct path to the graphics hardware without having to go through the cpu or the kernel etc, as little as possible anyway.
Anytime you have to context switch, you lose time, which hits performance hard, so everything is like cleared out the way and the software and hardware almost talk directly to each other, which doesn't really happen with any other software, writing files, accessing network, computing data, almost always goes through the cpu and the kernel and for graphics applications which render megabytes of data per second, this is just awful and dramatically kills the performance. The retina display on an ipad is 2560 x 1600, so at 24/32 bit colour, each complete frame is 11-15MB, imagine 60 of those? Easily 600 - 900 MB per second. All of that data is being transferred from the system to the gpu every second the display is on, so it's a huge amount of data. Of course, you can reduce this by using gpu memory buffers and "damages" to know which surfaces need to be re-rendered (i.e. rendered and transferred again cause the display information inside them changed)
However, this kind of "direct, get out of my way, let me speak to the manager" way of thinking doesn't really fit with the linux way of doing things, everything is integrated, the x protocol isn't really to blame, but the only reason for people wanting to keep x alive is because of the protocol, it is basically a way to draw pixels, lines, primatives, AND their favourite, abstract everything across a network so software can be anywhere and X will solve how to display it. EXCEPT IT DOESNT SOLVE IT!! Even when you want to network x, you have to manually setup a bunch of configuration on both machines to get it to work, it doesn't work by magic, or autoconfiguration, cause nobody cares enough to do it, evidently, cause even now you have to manually do this, 20 years later.....what a bullshit system....
Of course, then you get to the lower levels and a whole bunch of compromises come into effect, nobody agreed on even the most basic things, fonts, oh lets make a font server, which will never work properly because of all the compromises made for that and it'll only work in certain circumstances....
It really is the most bullshit, fucking stupid system ever created and people seem to be so stubbornly ignorant and stupid they refuse to kill it, cause I dunno, it's really hard to understand, you see some of the hatred for wayland from these people are you are just so flabbergasted by it, you can't even start to reason, why would you keep x alive? it's almost like it's their child, they wouldn't care if it had three arms, ate other babies and urinated acid and used it as a weapon, they STILL wouldn't kill it....or even contain it...cause it's their baby....Thats the kind of logic you're going up against if you talk to these idiots...
But it's such an ugly, nasty, knarly mess of bullshit and compromises that NO DESKTOP UI TOOLKIT USES IT, Qt, Gtk and Wx for example, pretty much just request a drawing rectangle and then do everything themselves, completely sidestepping x, but if you looked at the x protocol and especially a "unix haters" entry on the subject and know something about computers and/or programming, you'd understand why people want to kill it so badly.
Take a look at this and then try eval
Re: Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what you are doing is migrating one of Windows primary shortcomings into Linux.
In a country far away and long ago.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a country long ago and far away there lived the good King X the eleventh.
He had a lot of ministers, the most important of which had become the minister of Composition. His job was to have peoples houses painted. If you wanted your house painted, you would have to ask the King. Every day the king would spend long hours with the minister of Composition, who would know all the houses in the country, had an exact knowledge of the Royal Paint Budget, and could call in the painters.
Although almost everyone lived in the capital called Localhost the King would sometimes travel around the country and kindly hear peoples paint requests. Every night the King would return to his palace, talk to the minister of Composition, and then decide whether you could have your house painted, and when.
Then on a dark winter's night, a group of grumpy people thought how much more efficient it would be if everyone would talk to the minister of Composition directly. Thus the Wayland Conspiracy was born. The next day, at daybreak, they deposed the good King and made the minister of Composition the head of state: president Compositor. To cater for the few people in remote villages they re-appointed the King as secratary to the president: the Secretary for Remote Villages. He would still travel around the country (albeit in a suit, and without his crown). He would still talk to president Compositor every night, like in the old days.
The press in other counties, like Windonia and Applestan, were very positive: finally this backward country had a modern government. Now its poor inhabitants could have the same beautiful colored houses they had. Welcome to the modern world!
The people in the country itself didn't notice a lot of difference, however. In the old days things took a little longer, but not everyone needs his house painted every day. Many still called the Secretary for Remote Villages "King", especially in the countryside.
But the people in Windonia and Applestan were very satisfied: they always had felt that their geovernment was superior, and the Wayland revolution had proved their point.
The King just smiled.
Wow, the idiot is strong in this one. (Score:5, Insightful)
When something running under Wine runs faster with that translation than it does under windows, you cannot claim that the windowing system in X is slower and degrading performance of Linux compared to Windows.
It's taken as a matter of faith that this network transparency MUST be making it slow.
Merely because it is "obvious" that if something is flexible, it MUST be slower!
Re:or, do the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
You are insignificant in the face of our needs.
Back in the olden days of the Windows versus Linux flamewars--when it still mattered and OSX didn't exist, this was exactly the sort of arguments the Windows people used to make about Linux features.
Then the attitude was hackish and anything you could do seemed reasonable/fun/cool because, why insult what another user wants to do? It's their system after all. That sort of attitude was why a lot of us came to Linux and OSS in the first place.
It's sad to see that "begone you insignificant peon" is now infiltating the OSS culture. Please leave. Regardless of the merits of this particular fight, your attitude is total poison. Take it somewhere it can't do any damage.
Re:or, do the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow such stunning lack of vision. You and a bunch of other people latched on to this network transparency is to pricey a feature conception back in the late 90's and just can't let it go.
Let me clue you in. In Computing everything that is old is new again. We move back and fourth between centralization and decentralization. The current direction of things is toward centralization again. Just listen to people who keep saying cloud, PC over IP, and visualization. Then consider all the tablet and not quite designed to be a standalone machine hardware/software stacks being sold.
Windows got a leg up from being on the right spot of the curve at the right time. They built a comparatively simple localized talk directly to the hardware display solution during the decentralization trend. That served very well in the late 90's and early 2000's when everyone was focused on doing CAD and playing video games on their desktops. The hardware has gotten faster and the work around hacked into X.org have allowed it to mostly keep up though. Now the fact is the X.org model is broken too, modern toolkits are not using the drawing primatives and spend most of their time doing what amounts to pushing bitmaps around which does not offer really great network transparency. X.org needs a major rework; X11 was a solution for a slightly different set of problems than we have today, but just because it might not be the right specific solution now, does not be something else automatically is or that the fundamental concepts behind X are wrong.
Network transparency is NOT a misfeature and its NOT a niche use case.
Citrix and others are falling all over themselves right now trying to figure out how to export a rich application experiences from Microsoft's shitty non network transparent desktop and server platform backed by powerful hardware to Apple, and Microsoft's shitty tablet platforms. Xenprise is all about application network transparency; because people can't/don't want to try and deal with local storage and computation on their tablets.
If you want the UNIX/Linux world to enjoy the sort of success Windows did in the 95-2005 years its about catering to the centralization, decentralization cycle and having a modern ( ie not X11, but maybe an X12) display solution that is hardware independent, portable, and network transparent absolutely is the thing to do. Plan for 2015 - 2025 rather than trying to implement the ideas and compromises of 1995. Wayland and Mir are backward looking.
Re:How well does XWayland work? (Score:2, Insightful)
Name one standard graphics system used by more than one operating system. I only know of one, and that is X11. Everything else is people saying I don't like this particular detail about X11. Then they go and invent their own system. That way you end up with something, which is not only incompatible with everything else, it is also inferior to X11 in at least one area. Of course that reduces the chances that somebody else will pick up your new "standard", but making those competitors to X11 proprietary of course also helps ensure it will never become the new standard.
If you want cross OS compatibility and network transparency, X11 is still the only game in town. If you want to beat X11, it is not enough to be better than X11 in places where X11 isn't the best system around, you also have to be at least as good as X11 in areas where X11 does the best. I have seen Xorg work much better than the first X11 systems I worked with, so it definitely is possible to improve the system and remain backward compatible.
I don't know if Wayland will be backward compatible with X11, since I haven't tried it yet. But I can tell you this much, that it has to be, if they want me as a user.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
Running something over the network and being "network transparent" are two different things.
In the case of transparency the application should can have no knowledge of whether it is rendered locally, or remotely. It just sends draw commands and those commands end up somewhere.
Unfortunately most of the drawing commands in X do not work over the network basically meaning that X is no longer network transparent. For any which don't there's a compatibility layer where they are converted to bitmaps and sent over the network, which is not much different from the normal way a modern app renders on X, just bitmaps.
The point is X is not network transparent, and using it on the network is essentially like using VNC except without any compression. You actually have the worst of all worlds while the users somehow still think things are like they were in the 90s. Ever since DRI and similar technologies X has not been the same, and there's no reason why the move to Wayland + RDP can't be far better than what we have now and what everyone appears to be championing as a "core" feature of X without realising it doesn't actually work like that.