XWayland Aiming For Glamor Support, Merge Next X.Org Release

An anonymous reader writes that XWayland is nearly ready to be merged into the main X.org tree "X.Org Server 1.16 this summer should support XWayland, the means of allowing X11 applications to run atop Wayland-based compositors without the need for any application/game changes. With the revised design, XWayland has generic 2D acceleration over OpenGL and a cleaner design compared to earlier revisions. With GNOME 3.12 having better Wayland support and Plasma Next around the corner, it looks like 2014 could be the year of Wayland's take-off!" The patch series emails have more details. The big news here is that XWayland is ditching its old DDX model for one based on Glamor. eliminating the need for any X.org drivers to be written to support X11 on Wayland: "Finally, the last patch adds the Xwayland DDX. Initially Xwayland was an Xorg module that exposed an API for Xorg video drivers to hook into so that we could reuse the native 2D acceleration. Now that glamor is credible and still improving, a much better approach is to make Xwayland its own DDX and use glamor for acceleration. A lot of the code in the Xorg approach was busy preventing Xorg being Xorg, eg, preventing VT access, preventing input driver loading, preventing drivers doing modesetting. The new DDX in contrast is straight-forward, clean code, only 2500 lines of code and neatly self-contained." It does not yet have direct rendering or any acceleration, but those patches should come soon.

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Re:Is it just me?

[neuro88]

At this point, it's mostly just you. All this work going on vastly simplifies the stack. Wayland compositors are much simpler than the entire X stack (which has to be supported even though much of it isn't used). Unfortunately, X still needs to stay around in some capacity so we can still play our proprietary games ,etc.

Re:Remote display across network?

[sjames]

Actually, I do *NOT* want VNC. My objective is to run an X app on a server that itself has no video capabilities at all and have that window appear fully integrated on my workstation desktop. I do not want a window that contains an entirely unneeded desktop that contains the app window that I actually want.

VNC does not work better for that application, at all.

Re: acceleration

[dbIII]

This again? Two guys that worked on bits of Xorg are not collectively "the X developers". There are plenty of others out there working on stuff other than a nice tear free framebuffer for a phone. There are plenty of others that don't laugh at "running that app from 1996", who don't laugh at shaped windows, who don't bite the hand that is actually adding some wayland support and who have something better than a half finished presentation with no screenshots to show off their work.