The State Of The Wayland Display Server

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The State Of The Wayland Display Server

Last year the Wayland Display Server project was started by Kristian Hogsberg, a Red Hat developer and a name known well within the X.Org community for his work on AIGLX, Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2, and various other projects. We were first to talk about the Wayland Display Server in detail, which aims to provide a mini display server that is designed around the latest X/kernel technologies like the Graphics Execution Manager and kernel mode-setting. Wayland also integrates its own compositing manager and is designed to produce a perfect frame (a.k.a. no tearing) each and every time. There has not been much to report on this project recently, but we now have a status update courtesy of Kristian.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13857

[89c51]

good news


so practically as soon as we have GTK+ running in wayland we'll be able to have Gnome and XFCE right?? (or at least most of the apps)

[avilella]

He is also looking at the possibility of running a rootless X Server on Wayland so that Wayland can pull windows from the X Server into the currently running Wayland server session. This feature would be very interesting.

Does this mean that in the future a Wayland could be helping in providing graphics for some of the windows in a running X.org server?

There has been a lot buzz on hybrid graphics and it's status in Linux. Is it possible that in the future a Wayland server could be plugged to the hot-switchable graphics card in the laptop, that is turned on/off without reboot depending on the required tasks, whereas the main X.org could be using the other graphics card?

[srg_13]

Does this mean that in the future a Wayland could be helping in providing graphics for some of the windows in a running X.org server?

Other way around - Wayland would be rendering and compositing the desktop, but this would only let you use client drawn apps. So there would be an X server running rootless so you could use legacy apps. The X applications would then be pulled from the X server and would be composted with the normal ones.

It would be a lot like how Mac OS X handles X applications.

[hax0r]

Excellent news, +1 up for GTK+, GNOME, and its derivatives .

[kraftman]

Excellent news, +1 up for GTK+, GNOME, and its derivatives .

Hehe, they'll sooner or later bring support for QT, but it's sad they first support this thing... Modern display server and old gtk - it doesn't look so good...

[avilella]

Other way around - Wayland would be rendering and compositing the desktop, but this would only let you use client drawn apps. So there would be an X server running rootless so you could use legacy apps. The X applications would then be pulled from the X server and would be composted with the normal ones.

It would be a lot like how Mac OS X handles X applications.

So would it be possible for the Wayland+X.org configuration to work on two different graphic cards, one integrated and another one discrete?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/312756
http://linux-hybrid-graphics.blogspot.com/

[beniwtv]

It would be a lot like how Mac OS X handles X applications.

That has been worrying for me on Wayland (and I can't seem to find any info on this).

The _only_ reason I think that X is awesome, is because it's a client-server model. So, for example I can have my applications running on my server and displaying them on my computer.

Mac OSX can't do that. I just hope Wayland will continue to be client-server. Else, I won't bother, as VNC just doesn't cut it.

Anyone has more info about this?

Cheers,
Benedikt

[suokko]

Mac OSX can't do that. I just hope Wayland will continue to be client-server. Else, I won't bother, as VNC just doesn't cut it.

Anyone has more info about this?

Cheers,
Benedikt

You can run using indirect glx connection. It has fairly good performance even in wireless g network so if you have better than that connection any opengl application that doesn't take advantage of too new features should work well. You can test it by running some opengl application in your server using LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 enviroment varaible.

LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 neverputt

[avilella]

Other way around - Wayland would be rendering and compositing the desktop, but this would only let you use client drawn apps. So there would be an X server running rootless so you could use legacy apps. The X applications would then be pulled from the X server and would be composted with the normal ones.

It would be a lot like how Mac OS X handles X applications.

I am willing to start a wikipedia page to detail the differences and similarities between the graphical sides -- windowing and gui in general -- of Mac OSX versus X.org. Does anybody know if such thing exists anywhere?