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Graphics Open Source Upgrades X

Wayland 1.1 Released — Now With Raspberry Pi Support 197

An anonymous reader writes "Six months after the release of Wayland 1.0, versions 1.1 of Wayland and Weston have been released. Wayland/Weston 1.1 brings new back-end support for the Raspberry Pi, Pixman renderer, Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and FBDEV frame-buffer device. Wayland/Weston 1.1 also introduces a modules SDK, supports the EGL buffer-age extension, touch-screen calibration support, and numerous optimizations and bug-fixes."
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Wayland 1.1 Released — Now With Raspberry Pi Support

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  • Does it support a way to handle remote windows yet? Or does it still only support an entire desktop remoted?

    • The use case I am thinking of is that I ssh into a machine, then run gvim to edit a file.

      • by ArsonSmith ( 13997 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @10:36AM (#43462391) Journal

        Or, ssh into a development server and run eclipse.

        Or ssh into a new oracle host and launch the oracle installer

        With Wayland soon we'll have to have full graphical installs on ever server rather than just the minimal xlib to support remote viewing of applications.

    • by Trepidity ( 597 )

      Yes, as of a few weeks ago, support for FreeRDP [slashdot.org] is included.

    • This got hashed out around here two weeks ago. [slashdot.org]

      They seem to be going the RDP route for network apps. I'll have to leave criticism to the experts, but my own experience is that RDP on Windows has much better performance than X via ssh or VNC. And as of MS Server 2008, single apps can be shared (TS Remote Apps) - no longer do you need to share the entire desktop. I have no experience with FreeNX, because the servers I remote into don't have it installed.

      • by Hatta ( 162192 )

        The question is, how easy is it to use? With X forwarding, it's nothing more than 'ssh -X remotehost', then just run your program. Is RDP on Wayland going to be as convenient?

        • That would require a similar flag get built into ssh. I use "-Y" :)

          • by Hatta ( 162192 )

            ssh can proxy arbitrary connections with 'ssh -D'. Something like 'ssh -D 88888 wayland-rdp -port 8888 xterm' would be acceptable.

            • I think this page [github.com] describes how it would (theoretically) work with the current implementation. Definitely some room for improvement in terms of usability, but it doesn't look too bad.

              • by Hatta ( 162192 )

                That's really bad. With SSH, I can log in, cd to the directory I need to be in as if it were local, and run the app as if it were local, and it "just works".

                With this setup, it looks like I'm going to have to ssh into the remote machine, cd to the directory I need to be in, copy down that path, then run 'which' and copy down that path. Then I need to leave my ssh session, and construct an invocation of freerdp that includes both the paths I copied down before.

                The great thing about X forwarding is that fro

                • Well, I've never tried this method. It looks to me like they are opening CMD (on Windows) using this command. Depending on how RDP works, it's not inconceivable that further commands will pop open windows on the same RDP connection.

                  I've had the rare ill-behaved X application ignore the environmental variable for DISPLAY and cause me trouble, but on the whole it works really well with the -Y flag in ssh once you have your local X server configured.

        • I can't answer for Wayland, but on Windows you just type "mstsc" [microsoft.com] and provide whatever options you want (typically mstsc /v:remotehost)

          Once connected and logged in, you get your remote desktop (or app, as some people have said you can access just an app remotely) and you can do whatever you want as if you're running the remote computer locally.

          I imagine Wayland client will be of similar complexity, especially if its a compatible protocol.

        • by firewrought ( 36952 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @02:21PM (#43464979)

          The question is, how easy is it to use? With X forwarding, it's nothing more than 'ssh -X remotehost', then just run your program.

          Geeze Hatta, have some faith. If not in the Wayland developers themselves (who are also X developers and have some cred here, IIRC), then in the developers, distributions, and users of the Linux community writ large that will evaluate, integrate, and extend Wayland if it's advantageous over X or ignore if it's not.

          Everyone, including the Wayland developers, understands that network transparency is a necessary, compelling feature. It may undergo a shakeup and it may not be fully baked on day 1, but it will happen.

    • by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @11:03AM (#43462727) Homepage

      Wayland's native remoting protocol is under development but "only at the proof of concept state". http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~krh/weston/log/?h=remote [freedesktop.org] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-April/008555.html [freedesktop.org]

      All the people talking about RDP keep in mind that that's a stopgap and won't be needed long-term.

    • by dbIII ( 701233 )
      That was never part of the design just like running on non-linux systems was never part of the design.
      The fanboys compare it to X but it has a completely different purpose - it's the new SVGAlib.
    • Yes...try reading the article:

      - Another new back-end is providing RDP support, Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol. While this isn't the proper remote Wayland implementation previously talked about with experimental code, RDP clients can now connect to this Weston back-end that is compliant with FreeRDP.

  • wm api (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Can anyone point me to the docs for writing my own window manager?

  • by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @10:54AM (#43462611) Homepage

    Call me ignorant. but can someone explain why we have more than a post per week either about or mentioning Wayland for the last couple of months? Is it really that interesting for the average /. user to hear about every feature added to Wayland or every project/company whatever that supports or does not support Wayland in some way? Or is it just one of those strange obsessions of the /. editors?
    I understand it is an important project, supposed to be the successor to X11 etc so it has more interest to geeks than, say, bitcoins, but is it really that interesting?

    • can someone explain why we have more than a post per week either about or mentioning Wayland for the last couple of months?

      Because there's been a lot of activity in the desktop rendering space, particularly with Canonical using SurfaceFlinger and announcing Mir amid a spray of FUD.

      Of course, we could just start arbitrarily ignoring projects and other things that Ecuador doesn't like.

      • by Ecuador ( 740021 )

        Of course, we could just start arbitrarily ignoring projects and other things that Ecuador doesn't like.

        Yes, please, can we go back to Assange and how Ecuador offered him asylum?

      • by spitzak ( 4019 )

        Say what you want about Canonical, but Mir apparently kicked the Wayland developers in the ass and got them working again. Which is why there are so many posts about Wayland recently.

    • I'm reading. This is the kind of stuff I come to read, though sometimes I admit getting sucked into the trolling articles about BIG COMPANY X suing BIG COMPANY Y.

    • by ssam ( 2723487 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @11:07AM (#43462785)

      wayland is a pyramid scheme. the editors have mined lots of waylands when they were cheap, and now they are trying to push the price up so they can sell them all. anyone who thinks a wayland is worth $200 is a fool. they are only good for buying drugs. back to the gold standard. get off my lawn. waste of energy. where's my gun.

    • I understand it is an important project, supposed to be the successor to X11 etc so it has more interest to geeks than, say, bitcoins, but is it really that interesting?

      I find them quite interesting and would like the rate of Wayland news to be kept at its current level.

    • Call me ignorant. but can someone explain why we have more than a post per week either about or mentioning Wayland for the last couple of months?

      Because topics likes these generate web traffic. Bitcoin stories generate debates on its merits as a currency. Waveland stories generate X must live, RDP is better than X, and Linux may finally catchup debates.

      There may be more legitimate stories out there, but it wouldn't generate as much traffic and therefore aren't favored as much by this and other tech news si

  • You can dream up all the X replacements you want, but you need to deliver working code.

    Good job Wayland.

  • I'm Stoked (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tyler R. ( 2787023 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @11:07AM (#43462773)
    Wayland is going to be the best thing to happen Linux ever! This is what's going to make Steam games smooth, make graphical lags and glitches nonexistent, and set the stage for better graphics drivers from graphics card venders! I'm stoked! Can't wait for this to go mainstream!
    • One thing you didn't notice is Wayland is using those same hardware drivers that were built for X. Don't expect different performance in anything other than windows and widgets.
      • by snadrus ( 930168 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @04:42PM (#43466581) Homepage Journal

        I expect differences:
        - The GL part is the same, the renderer side is not.
        - The input subsystem is different.
        - Everything's Asynchronous by default
        - Daniel Stone testing Chrome startup showed that 497ms was due to just waiting for X responses (rendering & input).
        - Fewer context switches. Less message passing (since WM & rendering are 1 process).
        - Multiple GPUs for rendering are exposed to user-space

        About Drivers:
        - With Android drivers supported, Games can run on GPUs they couldn't have before.

  • On the one hand I am beginning to find this development interesting.

    On the other hand, we already have a proven stable graphical application protocol. It's called X and it's been around for 30 years. I just don't get it. Why reinvent the wheel?

    • Because of all the unused cruft in X that makes maintaining it a hairy beast.

    • by tuffy ( 10202 )

      Wayland promises to eliminate tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker, which would be a welcome change.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by firewrought ( 36952 )

      It's not reinventing the wheel so much as reorganizing it to remove legacy cruft from the performance-critical hotpath b/t clients and hardware.

      From the Wayland architecture overview [freedesktop.org]:

      Most of the complexity that the X server used to handle is now available in the kernel or self contained libraries (KMS, evdev, mesa, fontconfig, freetype, cairo, Qt, etc). In general, the X server is now just a middle man that introduces an extra step between applications and the compositor and an extra step between the compositor and the hardware.

  • At the most optimistic, Wayland is still one or two years away from mainstream use. Even then, most apps will run under the rootless X server.

    X will finally disappear if and when all apps upgrade to GTK3 or QT5 (which might be never).

    Wayland is X designed properly, however it is basically the same thing. It does not seem to yet acknowledge the wider changing context within which desktop Linux has to operate, i.e. we are moving away from a world where manufacturers produce devices for Windows (and don't care

    • Even years from now there will still be a few people who do actual work, and they won't be using tablets to do it. They'll be using computers and they'll need an OS which is optimized for productivity, not gaming, watching movies, tweeting, or shopping at Amazon. Few as they are, these people are willing to pay real money for a computer, like $2,000. Perhaps that is what GNOME and KDE should focus on, considering that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Canonical don't care.

      • by geek ( 5680 )

        Even years from now there will still be a few people who do actual work, and they won't be using tablets to do it.

        Are you sure about that? My phone has more processing power than my desktop did just 8-10 years ago. In fact my phone is so fast there really is no reason why I shouldn't be able to dock it to a monitor with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and get all of my work done on it. Then undock it and take it with me wherever I go.

        I have a full office suite on my phone. It does exchange activesync. I have a multitude of HTML5 compatible web browsers capable of handling most of the web applications I work with.

        I'm seeing

        • by spitzak ( 4019 )

          I think he means "a large screen that can hold more than one job at a time". Desktop has nothing to do with how powerful the machine is, and I really would not be surprised if in the end the machines on desktops and in phones are of equal power (probably because the desktop is just a screen communicating with bluetooth to a phone that is the actual computer).

          • Yeah, I'm thinking 30" monitor + keyboard + mouse, apps that aren't forced full screen, a real file system instead of crippled sandboxes, etc. If tablets can deliver that, more power to 'em, but I doubt it.

    • Every week I read "The desktop is dead", written by some retarded CEO or "guru". I am hopeful that the Wayland make things right (aka, desktop), but ... Where are the distros using then? Or he will be forever a curiosity?
    • I don't see any actual argument being made here that highlights how Wayland could possibly be obsolete by the time it is widely deployed. Mir doesn't even exist, and the only arguments for it were purely uninformed FUD.

    • by Hatta ( 162192 )

      At the most optimistic, Wayland is still one or two years away from mainstream use.

      The most optimistic projection is that Wayland will never be in mainstream use.

      Even then, most apps will run under the rootless X server.

      Leaving us endlessly confused over how to forward apps over the network. And leading to all sorts of confusion about window managers and decorations.

      X will finally disappear if and when all apps upgrade to GTK3 or QT5 (which might be never).

      As if those are the only toolkits in existence. Wh

  • First.. this thread is already amazing for the shit being peddled, and the non factual based opinion.

    From what I've read, the X devs don't like X. They don't think its network transparent, and they really don't like this idea that X is it.
    They are trying to fix a lot of problems through wayland. It seems to me that Linux should really put a lot of weight behind wayland, not so it purely replaces X, but so the underlying work can be done to find the best solutions.

    X has serious problems. And these are not li

  • by mike.mondy ( 524326 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @04:14PM (#43466323)

    Too many flames in these weekly Wayland discussions and not enough facts (or maybe the facts are downmodded; I've gotten to the point where if I look at a wayland article, I don't read all of the comments).

    So, I just spent 5 or 10 minutes skimming the Wayland FAQ [freedesktop.org] and architecture diagram [freedesktop.org].

    For comparison, when running X, you might have an ordinary window manager or you might have a compositing window manager [wikipedia.org]. The Wayland model is that it *is* a compositor that provides both window manager functions and some of the functionality of an X server.

    Intentionally misstating things rather badly, it sounds like the reason Wayland doesn't support remote displays is because it also doesn't support local displays! More accurately, wayland supports local displays (of course), but unlike X11 provides no way to render to them. Wayland doesn't do rendering; it apparently "just" knows how to swap video buffers to a display device and coordinate buffers between multiple clients.

    I'm thinking that, for example, if you want to write a graphical app, you might target OpenGL or cario and then expect your code to work in both Unix (with X) and on Windows (without X). With Unix/X, I'd expect an opengl library that handed X primitives to the X server. With Wayland, you'd apparently have an opengl library that rendered to a buffer and then handed the buffer off to the Wayland compositor.

    So, Wayland isn't doing some of the things we'd expect an X server to do. Wayland is never working with drawing primitives. It seems obvious that you'd never be able to run apps that use the old X toolkit libraries against Wayland without an X server in the picture. And, the FAQ admits this and notes that you'll need an X server in addition to Wayland for the foreseeable future.

    However, as others have noted, an obvious question is how efficiently a "native" Wayland app could be displayed remotely. If the app and its libraries are rendering graphics primitives into display buffers, it seems obvious that low level primitive operations are lost by the time wayland gets the buffers, so you now have to be able to efficiently transmit bitmap deltas. Queue arguments re whether drawing primitives are more efficient or bitmaps are more efficient... OTOH, it seems unlikely that apps would include their own rendering code instead of using as library. So, we can hope that the libraries offer both wayland and X backends, I guess.

    Not an X server developer nor a Wayland developer. I'm sure I garbled things somewhat, but perhaps someone could clarify the mistakes and help take a portion of the FUD out of the weekly Wayland discussions.

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