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Graphics Upgrades Linux

Wayland 1.2.0 Released With Weston 122

Posted by timothy from the somewhere-there's-a-kid-named-wayland-weston dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wayland 1.2 & Weston 1.2 have been released. Features of this quarterly update to the X.Org/Mir display competitor is support for color management, a new input method framework, a Raspberry Pi renderer/back-end, HiDPI output scaling, multi-seat improvements, and various other changes for this next-generation Linux desktop display protocol and compositor."
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Wayland 1.2.0 Released With Weston More

Wayland 1.2.0 Released With Weston

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  • Looks good! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CajunArson ( 465943 ) on Saturday July 13, 2013 @10:52AM (#44269575) Journal

    Wayland & Weston are coming along pretty well and we are seeing increased adoption in both GTK+/QT toolkits and in desktops with upcoming versions of KDE.

    One area where the developers need to go out and evangelize is on the front of EGL for proprietary drivers. Yes it's great that Intel's open source drivers (and to a lesser extend the open-source AMD & Nvidia drivers) have EGL support, but both AMD & Nvidia need to be convinced that EGL is important to their upcoming proprietary drivers too.

    The irony here is that Mir, which is is seen as a huge competitor to Wayland, could end up helping Wayland enourmously since Canonical doesn't seem to be afraid to pick up a phone and call people at AMD/Nvidia to talk about updating the drivers.

    • Anybody knows whether and when the BSDs - PC-BSD and others - will have Wayland available? Also, will KDE 5 and beyond continue to run on X as well, or just Wayland?

    • "The irony here is that Mir, which is is seen as a huge competitor to Wayland, could end up helping Wayland enourmously since Canonical doesn't seem to be afraid to pick up a phone and call people at AMD/Nvidia to talk about updating the drivers."

      Well, no, Canonical is not afraid to print loud press releases about how they're talking to AMD/NVIDIA, couched as confusingly as possible to make it sound like AMD/NVIDIA are already confirmed riders on the Mir train. It's a publicity exercise. I'm sure the Waylan

    • The irony here is that Mir, which is is seen as a huge competitor to Wayland, could end up helping Wayland enourmously since Canonical doesn't seem to be afraid to pick up a phone and call people at AMD/Nvidia to talk about updating the drivers.

      Take a minute or five and browse nvidia.com.
      What you'll discover is that for GPGPU business NVidia officially only supports the latest OS releases by three companies: MS Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
      What you won't find is official support for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

      And while it's a pretty safe bet that RHEL 7 won't support Wayland (it's said to be based on Fedora 19), it's certain RHEL 8 will support it and NVidia will support RHEL 8. The chances are high that NVidia

  • third post! (Score:5, Funny)

    by fredan ( 54788 ) on Saturday July 13, 2013 @11:00AM (#44269615) Homepage Journal
    since I'm using X11 ;-(

  • Wrong Summary (Score:2, Informative)

    by allo ( 1728082 )

    Wayland ist not a Xorg/Mir competitor, as mir is not affiliated in any way with xorg. Wayland is the planned successor of Xorg, while Mir is some Ubuntu project.

    • Mir is another alternative/competitor to Xorg... the difference is that Mir is following the idea of a rigid protocol where Mir is following the idea of providing an API... both of then have drawbacks... but I'm confident that Mir could win the run. History has prooved that its not the "perfect engineered solution" that always win... Despite of what you think... in the end... its all about user adoption.

      • Re: Wrong Summary (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I read that thing about "rigid protocol vs api" from shuttleworth's blog, and I still can't figure out how it isn't complete bullshit.

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Except it's complete bullshit. Read the announcement: Wayland 1.2.0 now provides a stable server API (it already provided a stable client API since 1.0.0) as well as a rigid protocol. Everything, everything, that has been said about Mir being better then Wayland is Grade-A Pure Bullshit. Also, Mir will lose because nobody else is ever going to use it. Wayland: all Linux distros except Ubuntu (including all commerically supported distros like SLE and RHEL). Mir: only Ubuntu. Hell, even the Ubuntu derivatives

    • Wayland is the planned successor of Xorg, while Mir is some Ubuntu project.

      Given the client-side success of Ubuntu and OEM support for Ubuntu, Mir can't and shouldn't be casually dismissed.

  • any decent tiling WMs? (Score:3)

    by Trepidity ( 597 ) <delirium-slashdot@@@hackish...org> on Saturday July 13, 2013 @11:49AM (#44269829)

    Is Weston the only choice, or is there anything vaguely analogous to i3 or dwm in terms of how windows are laid out and managed?

    • Re:any decent tiling WMs? (Score:5, Informative)

      by raxx7 ( 205260 ) on Saturday July 13, 2013 @12:20PM (#44270009) Homepage

      Yes and no.

      Weston is only a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor.
      Wayland developers don't expect it actually to be used by normal users.

      Instead, they expect others to implement their own Wayland compositors, as it should not be any harder than writing a similar X Window Manager.
      That is what the Gnome, KDE and Enlightmenment people plan to do, convert their current X compositors (gnome shell, kwin, e) into Wayland compositors.

      So, eventually, you might get a dwm Wayland equivalent. But it doesn't exist yet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )

      From what I've heard, window managers are much harder to write for Wayland than for X11 but there is an expectation there will be several in a few years. It isn't going to be like X11 though where you can create a basic window manager as a classroom assignment.

    • Weston is a replacement for Xorg; it's the reference implementation for Wayland, NOT a window manager.

  • The Real Story Behind Wayland and X.org (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Daniel Stone made a great presentation explaining various problems with X11 that Wayland tries to fix:
    http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_real_story_behind_Wayland_and_X.ogv [linux.org.au]

    The same presentation is also on YouTube:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )

      Good video link by the AC. Worth checking out.

    • Re:The Real Story Behind Wayland and X.org (Score:4, Informative)

      by cheesybagel ( 670288 ) on Saturday July 13, 2013 @06:32PM (#44272029)

      What I did manage to grasp from his talk is that the basic X design which he claims is terrible has remained for the most part while their fantastic new designs for things like XInput keep getting obsoleted one after the other. That he does not like the fact that X11 has a lot of extensions so his answer is to rewrite it. What will eventually happen if he ever has success is Wayland will get a lot of cruft as well.

      I also noticed he gave no demos of Wayland at all. He isn't even eating his own dogfood. At least the original X designers actually created it to solve a problem they had and they actually used it.

      His model of doing everything using pixmaps is also probably going to be a problem if displays keep going to higher resolutions as is happening recently. In that case you may spend a lot less bandwidth sending draw calls rather than the pixmaps.

      I also disagree about the claim that VNC is good enough.

      • What I'd like to see built as a replacement for X11's network abstractions, is a sandboxed VM running on top of the display server, passing arbitrary messages back and forth with the remote application.

        For example, take the llvm based pNaCl sandbox that the google Chrome team are building. Expose wayland API's for updating and displaying window pixmaps, and receiving input.

        Then you could port the widget libraries from a UI toolkit to run directly in this VM without imposing any limits to creativity and fu

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dbIII ( 701233 )

          What I'd like to see built as a replacement for X11's network abstractions

          Sockets - been there since before the first official release.

          passing arbitrary messages back and forth with the remote application.

          Is ssh what you are looking for? X thinks it's all local and ssh feeds the remote stuff to and from the local display, using those sockets that have been in there for years.

      • Re:The Real Story Behind Wayland and X.org (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday July 13, 2013 @09:02PM (#44272729) Homepage

        What I did manage to grasp from his talk is that the basic X design which he claims is terrible has remained for the most part

        What has remained are the parts that you really can't replace without ceasing to be X11, he goes to great lengths to explain how toolkits, compositors and extensions all try to work around it. It's the reason they want to replace X11 with Weston, not the other way around.

        while their fantastic new designs for things like XInput keep getting obsoleted one after the other.

        Or as others would call it, getting new features. Do I smell a case of WORKS4ME? Didn't need it, don't want it so nobody else should either, X11 is just fine the way it is.

        I also noticed he gave no demos of Wayland at all. He isn't even eating his own dogfood.

        It was a presentation not a demo, don't pretend you can't find demos on YouTube... There are even LiveCDs so you can try it yourself.

        His model of doing everything using pixmaps is also probably going to be a problem if displays keep going to higher resolutions as is happening recently. In that case you may spend a lot less bandwidth sending draw calls rather than the pixmaps.

        Which would be relevant if anybody was using X as a drawing library, but nobody does that anymore. There is OpenGL pass-through with GLX, but the final image acts like a pixmap to the X server and I assume there will be something similar with Wayland, in fact as I understand it that's the only way Wayland will work as it has no drawing routines of its own.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )

        The basic design for X... not really. The basic design for X does a great job of solving the problem of solving the problem of how to distribute workload on a LAN when servers can do the complex graphics while clients can't. That's not the situation anywhere. Motif is not the way things are done. Everyone is constantly trying to get around the basic design for X because they want to shift workload from the servers (X-Client) to the client (X-Server). So no I don't think the basic design has lasted.

        A

  • Is it possible to run a Wayland display server in a big full-screen window on X11? That would be a fairly easy way to test wayland out and develop using the wayland GTK or Qt libraries. One huge advantage to this would be that I don't need to wait for driver support. As long as X11 had a driver, I'd be good to go. Since Wayland would be writing through (presumably) openGL to a full screen window, none of X11's asynchronous speed problems would be noticeable; waylands renderings within the window would al

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )

      X11 runs on top of Wayland. I imagine you might be able to run Wayland on X11 by creating a fake screen but it could be brutally slow. Pretty much, yes you have to wait for driver support.

      • X11 runs on top of Wayland.

        X11 can run top of Wayland. It doesn't necessarily.

        I imagine you might be able to run Wayland on X11 by creating a fake screen but it could be brutally slow

        If you do it badly, sure.

        Wayland wants the world to be a collection of draw buffers (i.e. one per window more or less). There's no reason you couldn't simply have one X11 window for each Wayland window. Given it's all GL all the way down and X11 supports pretty much the fastest 3D graphics so far, I don't see why it would be

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbolden ( 176878 )

          I guess that's true. If you wrote a protocol so that each Wayland client believed it was talking to a Wayland compositor while really that was code running on the X-Server, and the X-Server took information from the X-compositor and transformed it into Wayland-compositor messages it would be possible to do that. That's a lot of work though.

          I don't think anyone is doing it. So the answer is that's man years that no one intends to spend.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Weston will launch fullscreen on X11 which may given you what you want. ./weston --fullscreen

      There's a build script for Wayland here which builds it under Debian:
      http://www.chaosreigns.com/wayland/buildscript/

      I believe arch linux has an AUP for Wayland and Debian sid has binaries for the most recent versions.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Yes. Specify the x11-backend.so when starting Weston and it runs on top of X.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spitzak ( 4019 )

      Yes you can run Wayland inside an X window. It does this automatically if $DISPLAY is set when wayland is run. This is in fact the only way I have gotten it to work. It is certainly a requirement for Wayland development right now. I have two monitors and I just run it fullscreen in one of the monitors, with the launching terminal in the other one so I can see error messages.

      For me it uses the X shm interface to transfer the pixmaps from Wayland to X (I believe it may just transfer a single image that corres

  • Remoteability question restated (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LaughingRadish ( 2694765 ) on Saturday July 13, 2013 @05:26PM (#44271697) Journal

    Here's a very simple question with hopefully no wiggle room: Suppose I have two Linux boxes, each running Wayland. They do not run X11 in any form or fashion. I am on the console of one of them and in Wayland. Can I start a terminal emulator, ssh over to the other box, issue a command that starts some graphical program (which uses only Wayland coding, no X11), and expect that program's window to show up on the first box? Assume that ssh has already been modified to allow for this sort of thing. If this cannot be done, what prevents it from being done? I have yet received no complete answer for this.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )

      Wayland is going to be implementing some like RDP to handle this. Wayland natively does not handle this. So if your question is in terms of "Wayland as it is likely to exist" then likely you will be able to do it. If your question is "Wayland by itself with none of the supporting ecosystem" no. On the other hand normal screen sharing stuff like VNC would work.

      What prevents it from being done is that Wayland applications share their graphical and application buffer. You can't pull it apart without vir

      • Thanks. This is the most direct answer I've gotten so far. A followup: How much work has been done on that part of the supporting ecosystem to support remoting?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbolden ( 176878 )

          Lots of experiments and some of the initial testing, more or less a functioning prototype. My opinion is the functional version will be in the next version of KDE/GNOME: KDE 5 and GNOME 4 and that's if all goes reasonably well.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dbIII ( 701233 )
            The last link I found on that was from a couple of years ago where the "more or less a functioning prototype" didn't work at all when he tried out his idea and the developer moved on to other things. Care to provide something that refutes that or is it something completely out of your field?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jbolden ( 176878 )

              sure the port of FreeRDP by Kristian Høgsberg into Wayland is much more recent.

              http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-March/007740.html [freedesktop.org]

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dbIII ( 701233 )
                Finally some sort of answer! Very ugly and inefficient hack but it's early days so likely to improve. Next how about something along the line of benchmarks like I've been asking for since about six wayland articles ago? Obviously not remote ones since it's far too early, just something about performance feeding pixels to the local video hardware would be nice. Since the argument is about the loss of flexibility being worth the performance gain I don't think that is too much to ask.
                • To avoid time wasting trite rubbish light speed of light stuff, what I mean above is the performance in terms of how long it takes for the application to call for something to be drawn, then it going through the layers to the compositor before being sent to the video hardware. I still remain unconvinced by block diagrams that hide internal complexity which is why I keep asking for benchmarks.
                    • What was the point of posting a Mir benchmark to a question about Wayland?
                      Were you hoping I would not follow the link and you could tell yourself you had won some sort of childish mass debate game? Until now you had me half considering you may know what you are writing about. Can someone with a clue reply instead in?

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by jbolden ( 176878 )

                      Because it is the same approach and Mir is further along. Wayland isn't at the benchmarking phase yet they are still getting stuff to work at all.

                      What is your damage? Why it works in theory is clear. Microsoft, Apple and early systems show how well it works in practice. Mir proves it works well in practice for Unix. You want good quality benchmarks of well know Unix apps running on both X11 and Wayland wait till 2016 or so.

                    • "Because it is the same approach and Mir is further along. Wayland isn't at the benchmarking phase yet they are still getting stuff to work at all."

                      Um. No. Phoronix benchmarked XMir. XWayland, which is precisely the same thing for Wayland, has existed in usable form for months or years.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by dbIII ( 701233 )

                      Because it is the same approach and Mir is further along

                      No it most definitely is not. Why are you lying?

      • AFAIK, RDP lets you see the entire remote screen, not the windows of a single program. There's a big difference. Imagine GIMP; with xorg+ssh you get 4 floating windows. With RDP, you have a the remote desktop with 4 windows inside of it. You can't stack remote and local windows as freely.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbolden ( 176878 )

          That depends on the application. The applications has to be able to accept RDP as a shell and then the "alternative shell" commend from Windows allows it to open in RDP as a single applications.

          \Unix programs using RDP, even today, have never had that problem because they expect to run in different shells. So until GNOME apps absolutely positively won't run in anything but Gnome, or KDE apps absolutely won't run in anything but KDE we should be fine.

        • AFAIK, RDP lets you see the entire remote screen, not the windows of a single program.

          https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/wiki/RemoteApp [github.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      It's something the wayland developers do not consider to be a feature worth implementing at this time so the only answer you'll get are guesses as to how it may be done later. I wish the wayland people would discuss their thing on it's own merits instead of pretending it can do everything that X does better when it really has different aims.
  • Where are the benchmarks to back up all the claims that it is better than X? Even something showing catchup or even a degree of usability would be nice.

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