No KMS? No Mesa? Run Wayland Off A Linux Framebuffer!

[phoronix]

Phoronix: No KMS? No Mesa? Run Wayland Off A Linux Framebuffer!

Besides needing to get the various tool-kits and other libraries ported to run atop the Wayland Display Server, another requirement limiting the adoption of this X11 Server alternative so far has been the specialized graphics requirements. From the beginning, Wayland was designed for GPU drivers that support kernel mode-setting (KMS), Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) buffers, and OpenGL ES, among some other smaller requirements. Originally only the Intel Linux driver would work, but since then the various branches needed to support Wayland have been merged to their mainline code-bases and it's possible to run Wayland with the open-source ATI Radeon and Nouveau drivers too. But those using the proprietary ATI or NVIDIA drivers have not been able to run Wayland nor those people utilizing the VESA driver or any of the other obscure graphics drivers that lack any of the needed GPU driver capabilities. This though has now changed as it's been proved possible that Wayland in fact can run off a Linux frame-buffer...

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

[avilella]

I wonder, on the hybrid graphics[1] front, since the current limitations of running a Linux system with two or more graphics chipsets seems to be X11 code, what would change with the move to Wayland?

1. http://launchpad.net/~hybrid-graphics-linux

[FunkyRider]

are you kidding? this kind of stuff can help Wayland adoption? A piece of crap integrated GPU will beat the shit out of the latest 6 core CPU in terms of render acceleration, this is purely for experiments. Seems cool but useless.

[BlackStar]

are you kidding? this kind of stuff can help Wayland adoption? A piece of crap integrated GPU will beat the shit out of the latest 6 core CPU in terms of render acceleration, this is purely for experiments. Seems cool but useless.

Yes, in fact it will. This is not meant for end-users, this is meant for developers who wish to hack Wayland but hitherto couldn't due to lack of drivers.

This should also enable Wayland under VirtualBox, which is a huge win all around.

[thefirstm]

Let's see... X with hardware accelerated everything, or Wayland with my expensive NVIDIA GPU acting like a dumb framebuffer. Which will I pick......

[droidhacker]

Excellent. Hopoefully, nvidia will consider this "supported" and not make any further updates to their driver to handle it directly. This would boost the migration away from the nasty blobs, which is a VERY good thing.

[thefirstm]

Excellent. Hopoefully, nvidia will consider this "supported" and not make any further updates to their driver to handle it directly. This would boost the migration away from the nasty blobs, which is a VERY good thing.

A very good thing, only if you like slow 2D, slow/incomplete 3D, no/incomplete video acceleration, and high power usage.

[BlackStar]

Fail troll is fail.

[Ranguvar]

Let's see... X with hardware accelerated everything, or Wayland with my expensive NVIDIA GPU acting like a dumb framebuffer. Which will I pick......

It couldn't be more obvious that this is simply to make Wayland more accessible for hacking by developers.

A very good thing, only if you like slow 2D, slow/incomplete 3D, no/incomplete video acceleration, and high power usage.

Because Wayland becoming the default system to use and Nouveau then the default driver to use with it would slow/halt progress on all those issues, instead of boosting them dramatically.
Oh wait...

[thefirstm]

I paid for my Nvidia card to use its full feature set now, not in a few years.