Keith Packard Comments On Valve Work

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Keith Packard Comments On Valve Work

As reported earlier, Keith Packard is Valve's latest driver developer hire for bettering the Linux display stack for gaming, and in particular, VR. Keith has now shared a few comments on his new endeavor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Keith-Packard-Valve-Work

[dungeon]

So, it was spare time job

[linuxjacques]

The frame time reporting under composited desktop will be good for video too.

[iznogood]

I do not understand why they are still talking about X. Valve is developing new apps and games that clearly do not need a full desktop environment to run. Shouldn't they focus on Wayland for that?

[FishPls]

I do not understand why they are still talking about X. Valve is developing new apps and games that clearly do not need a full desktop environment to run. Shouldn't they focus on Wayland for that?

One ships, the other does not.

[haagch]

The frame time reporting under composited desktop will be good for video too.

There are already APIs that do that, like VDPAU. And game developers have even been desperate enough to do something like

- On Linux, VDPAU can now be used for displaying frames. It's used to achieve smoother framerates because it allows precise tracking and scheduling of frame times. Added ogl_bEnableVDPAU cvar (disabled by default) to control whether VDPAU is used - requires gfxRestart().

https://steamcommunity.com/app/257510/discussions/0/527274088387719794/

[SaucyJack]

One ships, the other does not.

Redhat ships it last I heard. But it is still 6-12 months from becoming the default in the Linux ecosystem. And that's assuming they can get all the functionality of x in there. Still, with LinuxVR being as far away as it is it just seems focusing on wayland would make more sense.

[haagch]

The remaining problems with wayland are mostly things you don't care much for about for VR applications.

The thing with a free software stack is that they could implement their stuff at any level. On windows they have the options to build on top of the windows desktop, or bypass it (or beg microsoft to implement something for them). On Linux they can just make their steamvr vrcompositor a wayland compositor. Why bypass the middleman, if you can just make us of it for your purposes?

You could even extend the wayland protocol itself. For example for openhmd someone there have been experiments with adding stereoscopy to be used for VR: https://linkmauve.fr/files/stereoscopy-unstable-v1.xml

[FishPls]

Redhat ships it last I heard. But it is still 6-12 months from becoming the default in the Linux ecosystem. And that's assuming they can get all the functionality of x in there. Still, with LinuxVR being as far away as it is it just seems focusing on wayland would make more sense.

Valve is planning on shipping or at least announcing VR games this year already. There's no way Wayland can mature enough for Valve to put all their eggs in that basket. Better go with what's stable and working.

(Also, Wayland will never "get" all the functionality of X)

[ElectricPrism]

This seems like a practical move to me. SteamOS currently uses X, the developers develop for X, It'll be a while before Wayland is defacto.

Another way of looking at this is: How long did it take before Gnome became stable and functional enough for most users???

For me that was about 3.16 ( Must be the 8th major release of their fancy new shell)

A world-class product needs zero-bullshit just-works software.