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Graphics Open Source Software BSD

Wayland Ported To DragonFlyBSD (phoronix.com) 152

An anonymous reader writes: Wayland 1.9 and the reference Weston compositor have been ported to DragonFlyBSD. Significant changes were made to get Wayland/Weston running, and you must either already be running an X.Org Server or be using the Linux-ported Radeon and Intel kernel mode-setting drivers, plus jump through a few setup steps.
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Wayland Ported To DragonFlyBSD

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  • That systemd is such a hot item because it replaces the old init system. Why is this argument not used against X11? It has a code base spanning 4 decades now but we can't go all crazy with it and start a new model...

    • by Anonymous Coward

      because it replaces the old init system.

      That's just it. It doesn't JUST replace the old init system. If it just replaced the old init system, systemd wouldn't be a 'hot item', as you say.

    • by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @03:55PM (#50720199) Homepage Journal
      Old init ran init scripts. New init manages complex dependencies, makes sure the system state stays proper, journals failures, and generally does a lot of system component integration. People prefer cobbled together over complex architecture.
      • People prefer cobbled together over complex architecture.

        That's an interesting point.

    • because people could even install both X11 and wayland and run one or the other depending on what mood they're in. no lock-in to anything.

      • There's no "lock-in" to systemd either. If you don't like systemd switch to one of the plenty of distros without it or create your own rather than simply whining.

        • You must be new here. And to open source. "Whining" is everywhere and continuous. What sheltered life you have.
        • The problem is that systemd's functionality spans way beyond an init system or even a daemon management system. Sooner or later, Linux apps are going to be built on top of systemd functionality. Therefore you will be stuck switching over to systemd if you want to use those apps or hope that someone maintains init compatibility within those apps. And then projects based off of that software will start to depend on the systemd functionality, creating multiple layers of mess.

          It all boils down to the fact
          • Sooner or later, Linux apps are going to be built on top of systemd functionality.

            Then fund or start projects to build alternative libraries. Project's don't just lock into something for shits and giggles. They lock into something that provides functionality, i.e. cgroups. All that is needed is an alternative interface to cgroups and you're sweet again.

            That's the beauty of open source, the ability to port applications as well as create multiple competing libraries.

            Also systemd is neither and init system nor a daemon management system. It's a system management daemon. It's right there in

            • But your suggestion requires actually doing work rather than whining about work that someone else is doing. That's why none of the distros listen to these whiners since they aren't actual contributors.

              • by sjames ( 1099 )

                So if I dump toxic waste in the park next to your house and point out all you need to do is clean it up if you don't like the stench, you're cool with that?

            • by Anonymous Coward

              That was done and all the whiners were happy that they had a distribution without PulseAudio, without Wayland, without Gnome 3 and without systemd!

              But than they started whining because they had to work to make that distribution a success. So after a lot of whining they forked the distribution again and they have now a distribution without all those new software they whined about and with no work to do!

              But now they are whining on Slashdot instead, because the fork without work to do didn't really do anythin

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Sure. [without-systemd.org]

            Free/Open Source Operating systems without systemd in the default installation

            GNU/Linux distributions

            4MLinux (BusyBox)
            Absolute Linux
            Alpine Linux
            Amazon Linux AMI
            antiX
            AUSTRUMI (Slackware based bootable live CD, to be run from RAM)
            Calculate Linux
            ConnochaetOS
            Crux
            DeLi(cate) Linux (legacy hardware)
            Devuan
            Dragora GNU/Linux Libre
            Exe GNU/Linux
            Funtoo Linux (Using OpenRC)
            Gentoo Linux
            While an option is provided to install systemd for those that want it, the default init system in Gentoo Linux as of May 2015 is OpenRC. If Portage is pulling in systemd, please read this Gentoo wiki article before removing Gentoo from this list. Other suggested reading, [1]
            gNewSense GNU/Linux
            GNU Guix
            Linux from Scratch
            Manjaro OpenRC Forum Wiki
            Obarun (Arch/Runit)
            Openwall GNU/*/Linux (Owl)
            PCLinuxOS
            Pisi Linux
            Porteus
            Puppy Linux
            Refracta
            RLSD
            Sabotage Linux
            Salix
            Slackel
            Slax
            Slackware
            Sorcerer Linux
            Source Mage GNU/Linux (beta site)
            SystemRescueCd (Gentoo/OpenRC based system rescue disk)
            TLD Linux
            TRIOS (Serbian)
            Tiny Core Linux
            TTYLinux
            Vector Linux
            Void Linux
            Zenwalk

          • And since I know you'll complain about the list I posted above, simply make your own distro then. Or just leave Linux entirely. None of the distro makers have any obligation to care about your feelings about systemd when you aren't someone who puts in any work into maintaining the distro or financial supports it. You're just a whiner in the peanut gallery.

            • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

              Comment removed based on user account deletion
              • by KGIII ( 973947 )

                A quick count and, and I'm not sure that this is either supporting or whatnot, I've used 11 of the distros in that list. Albeit in a VM, sure but some have made it to bare metal. The kicker is, I'm an OS whore. Sad but true... I jump between distros and often don't even install an OS but just run from a live disk. (I've got enough RAM and compute power to do that. Comfortably, too.)

                So, I'm not sure if this supports your statement or detracts from it. However, some of them are fairly robust, have some histor

        • Yes there is, non-systemd distros have shim packages with systemd calls so the normal wares that now depend on systemd

      • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @05:13PM (#50720913)

        install both X11 and wayland and run one or the other

        And what happens when some major app switches to the Wayland libs, leaving X networking behind? Sure, there's an X compatibility layer. But given the attitude of Wayland supporters ("nobody networks clients anymore, so lets throw this stuff out") I don't anticipate support for that feature to be long lived.

        There are too many people running around, both in the systemd and Wayland camps who think that, because they don't do something or understand it, it just doesn't need to be done. Why don't we all take up a collection to buy them GameBoys or XBoxes and keep them away from important systems stuff?

        • But given the attitude of Wayland supporters ("nobody networks clients anymore, so lets throw this stuff out")

          Then use the RDP feature that they implemented something like 2 years ago.

          • by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @07:04PM (#50721931) Journal

            RDP is simply not an adequate substitute for a network-transparent window system. Yes, it'll let you do some things badly, and other things mediocrely, but that's about it. And I haven't seen any evidence that the Wayland folks understood that early on, so I haven't kept up with Wayland when there's working X.Org.

          • by PPH ( 736903 )

            Because not many application hosts support it. They run Xlib xclients. So as long as the X compatibility feature continues to be supported, fine.

            But I'm not holding my breath. Because the prevalent attitude seems to be if they don't understand how something works or why, throw it out.

        • There are too many people running around, both in the systemd and Wayland camps who think that, because they don't do something or understand it, it just doesn't need to be done. Why don't we all take up a collection to buy them GameBoys or XBoxes and keep them away from important systems stuff?

          There are also too many people in the peanut gallery who feel that they are entitled to tell the developers of software what they should do while doing no work of their own.

          • and there are also contributors who moreover have sys admin experience over hundreds of systems, whose common sense and experience is being ignored due to political methods employed by those with no engineering sense but who have large megaphones

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Plenty of people are asking why we want to fork lift X out for something completely different. Lots of people are arguing the handful of real and actual problems that do exist with X can by solved by adding (some of which has already happened) a few more extensions and that if you don't care about the old X protocol stuff well don't use its mostly harmless to you just sitting there. So yes people are making that argument.

      SystemD raised more neck hairs though for more people because, lets face it there jus

      • by Lunix Nutcase ( 1092239 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @04:32PM (#50720497)

        Plenty of people are asking why we want to fork lift X out for something completely different.

        And how many of them are current X.org developers? Because most of the Wayland developers are long time X.org and previously FreeX86 developers.

        Lots of people are arguing the handful of real and actual problems that do exist with X can by solved by adding (some of which has already happened) a few more extensions and that if you don't care about the old X protocol stuff well don't use its mostly harmless to you just sitting there.

        Then those "lots of people" should put up or shut up. On the other hand, the people who actually have been trying to do that with X.org for nearly a decade say its horrendous and thus that's why they're working on Wayland.

        • Obviously that should be *XFree86*.

        • Re:I find it amusing (Score:4, Informative)

          by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @05:28PM (#50721071) Journal

          The trouble with Wayland, or rather why I'm deeply suspicious of it is that some of the claims from the devs about wayland and X11---and bear in mind they're X11 devs too---are flat out wrong at best and deeply deveptive at worst. Why the need for a FUD attack? If Wayland is better it ought to win on merit, not FUD.

          Tahe for example this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p [phoronix.com]... [phoronix.com]

          Going through one at a time.

          1. Extensions are what X11 calls API updates. Wayland will get API updates too, so this is not an advantage of wayland beyond version 1.0.

          1. A, B, C: Almost all extension version updates add new API calls and keep the old ones. Sending Foo 2.0 calls to Foo 2.2 works just fine. Not to say that versioning isn't a problem, but then fixing the API is apparently bad for X but nothing else.

          2. Well core X11 is super simple and a tiny setup of Xinput 2. This leaves essentially 2 input systems left of any complexity, 2.2 and 2.0, and as far as I can tell 2.0 isn't actually separate from 2.2. So, basically X has one major input system which actually looks kinda similar to the Wayland one.

          3. That's a misunderstanding of "mechanism not policy"

          4. So Xorg and Xfree86 got a bit crazy and then got refactored. Apparently historical cleanups are a bad thing? This happens in any project of any age.

          5. Apparently it's impossible to add a new API call for synchronisation because from (1) that X11 isn't allowed api updates unlike every other system.

          6. Yeah OK, fonts are not great.

          7A A badly designed chunk of Xorg is apparently a problem with X11 now. Oh and it's been fixed so it's not a problem at all. But apparently every misstep in one implementation of an X server fixed 5 years ago is a reson it's bad now.

          7B That was pure fud in 2013 when it was written. Xrandr and monitor hotplugging has worked flawlessly for years.

          7C Huh? There's been xrandr front ends for years which remember certain layouts. Hell, Arandr, the nice GUI point and click one in all the repos remembers layouts just fine.

          7D That smells like bullshit to me. Unless the second monitor is a separate screen (X11 term for something little used now) they it'd be impossible for one to have compositing and one not. I've not heard of anyone using screens in years.

          8 Yeah and real toolkits are poorer for it. The window tree is a really nice thing when you have latency. Because with tree'd systems the server remembers which sub-sub-sub window a mouse click went to, and you could ignore the absolute position. With a treeless system all you have to go on is the position.

          With latency, if you click, then the display updates then it processes the click, your click goes not where you want, but where the GUI is now. This I find happens more often than I'd like in web "apps". With tree based systems, sure the widget moved, but the assignment of the click to the window was latency free, so your click ends up correctly on the now-moved widged.

          IOW tree based systems are superior. Many toolkits abandoned it for compatibility with non tree based systems. What we have now is actually fundementally worse in high latency environments.

          9 Yes this is finally a genuine, no-nuance flaw.

          10 C this is not correct if you have a compositing window manager, because it can do whatever it likes with the final display.

          10 D their solution is to make the compositor do all this shit in Wayland. That could be done equally well in X. Sure, the current convention has a small flaw, but X11 now supports the Wayland way too.

          10 E just use the features of the compositing window manager. It intercepts all key presses and windows anyway.

          So without getting into the merits or demerits of Wayland, it's disappointing to see the devs engaging in a colossal FUDstorm.

          • The trouble with Wayland, or rather why I'm deeply suspicious of it is that some of the claims from the devs about wayland and X11---and bear in mind they're X11 devs too---are flat out wrong at best and deeply deveptive at worst. Why the need for a FUD attack? If Wayland is better it ought to win on merit, not FUD.

            Great. So you're going to take over the maintenance burden then, right? Or are you just going to whine and complain and expect that they should care?

            • Pointing out disengenuous arguments is whining now? Is that the bes rebuttal you've got?

              Now the amusing thing you miss is that you don't understand is that most of the "oh it's so bad" complaints are about the Xorg server architecture not so much the X protocol itself. You're promoting the people who made it a colossal mess (as they're Xorg developers) as the best way to not make a mess doing something similar. Interesting...

              • Oh I understood everything. My point is, since you've definitely proven the Wayland developers as liars and incompetents then you're going to take over the maintenance, right? Why would you allow these incompetent liars to continue being the people running X.Org?

                • Why would you allow these incompetent liars to continue being the people running X.Org?

                  How precisely would I eject them? You do realise I don't own the site, right?

                  • How precisely would I eject them? You do realise I don't own the site, right?

                    Fork it and maintain it yourself and make the current X.Org people irrelevant like they did to XFree86. Or you can sit back and criticize them while putting in no work of your own which means they can continue to write off your opinion.

          • That's a nice post.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by organgtool ( 966989 )

      Why is this argument not used against X11?

      Because Wayland is being written with a clean, modular design that doesn't attempt to tightly couple a bunch of unrelated nonsense into it to create a complicated mess. Because Wayland is being written primarily by former X developers who have pushed X to its limits but have no choice but to start from the ground up to get modern features such as tear-free drawing. Because Wayland is capable of running X applications thanks to a compatibility layer. I'm sure the

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Because Wayland is being written primarily by former X developers who have pushed X to its limits but have no choice but to start from the ground up to get modern features such as tear-free drawing.

        Strictly speaking that's not true, from the Wayland FAQ (emphasis mine):

        Why not extend the X server?

        Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option.

        I guess the main reason Wayland doesn't take so much flak is that it's obvious the mission scope has vastly changed from the 1980s display server to the 2015 display server. And it's main deficiencies are most visible in the markets where it's barely present (desktop) or has been replaced wholesale (Android), while the init system seems like you're changing a winning team, honestly when was the last time init scripts was a deal breaker

    • X was built with a client/server architecture paradigm. These days, the X server doesn't do anything, because the local client uses the local display directly, skipping the server altogether. At this point, all we really need is a compositor. Wayland fits nicely.
      • X was built with a client/server architecture paradigm.

        So is Wayland.

      • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @05:01PM (#50720807)

        These days, the X server doesn't do anything,

        What about receive connections from remote x clients and put them on the display.

        Linux/*NIX is used for more than gaming. Shocking, I know. But you'll get over it.

        • And yet even outside of gaming, only a tiny minority of people would use that feature since the vast majority of Linux applications don't support network transparency to begin with. Unless you truly think the mainstream Linux user is doing nothing but using XTerm all day (and they're not).

          • by PPH ( 736903 )

            since the vast majority of Linux applications

            UNIX applications in corporate environments. Linux being the desktop. At least Cygwin/X will still support TCP while you clowns gut Linux. The desktop was a neat dream while it lasted.

            • by KGIII ( 973947 )

              Am I mistaken or are you suggesting a return to the dumb terminal?

              Actually, with so much computing being done in "the cloud" it really has started to look like a return to those days. Hmm... That which is old is new again. I am not, honestly, sure what side I am on assuming that I own and control the remote resources as well as the 'terminal' that is attached to it. It does seem like we're sort of returning to those days just with more local resources to work with the remote data, load more content, and cyc

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            WRONG! I have never seen an X application that won't run over a network connection to the X server on another machine.

            There's that FUD thing again.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        Be careful with that claim. Many people routinely run GUI probrams on remote machines that don't even have their own display. Most commonly, they use ssh's x11 forwarding.

    • I have the X11 book on my shelf, and it's about 300 pages long. Most people don't understand it. Nonetheless, there are a lot of criticisms [slashdot.org]. Generally when someone re-writes a project from scratch, it deserves to be criticized. But X wasn't particularly great to begin with. There were a lot of criticism even when it was written, calling it bloated, etc. The "Unix Haters" handbook has a whole chapter on the topic. So if it gets replaced, meh........hopefully it's with something better (which doesn't seem to
      • "People have been reading through the code [slashdot.org] and finding things to dislike." - well, thats a surprise. people have differing opinions on coding styles. i'm shocked
        • Most people who like systemd like it because of the features it provides.
          Most people who dislike systemd, dislike it because of the code quality.

          You seem to like it, so I'm going to guess you have no understanding of the code quality, and only like the features.
          • code quality style opinions have been a dung heap of nonsense for years, its always the last resort of trying to trash something or someone.
            • Uh.....no, some code is good, and some code is bad, and you know it.

              If you've read the code and you like it, then say it. If you haven't then sit down while the grown ups talk, please.
  • by Galactic Dominator ( 944134 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @03:45PM (#50720127)

    GNUBSD now with more GNU!

  • My condolences to any DragonFly users that cared about good features like network transparency that this current generation of coders think are archaic. It would seem the infection is spreading.

  • So far, haven't seen FreeBSD come up w/ any plans. Actually, this should be more of a PC-BSD project as far as FreeBSD goes. Dunno whether either NetBSD or OpenBSD will be interested. But good work, DragonFly!!!

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