Wayland Is Almost Ready For Showing Off

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland Is Almost Ready For Showing Off

If you haven't tried out the Wayland Display Server as of late, after there being a stream of new announcements, you probably should or at least check out the videos in this posting. The Wayland Display Server is becoming more lively and slowly reaching a point where it may be possible for some to use it on a day-to-day basis...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA1MDc

[oliw]

As helpful as rotating windows is do we yet know why people will want to migrate away from X? Seriously, I'm not trying to troll: what problem is Wayland going to solve?

And assuming that is worth writing home about (and it could well be awesome), what benefit is that to a wide community like ours where people do use binary-blob drivers like Nvidia's?

[AnonymousCoward]

Well, X just doesn't do anything useful these days. The X rendering functionality (like XDrawLine) isn't used any longer, as it doesn't offer the functionality that is required nowadays (like anti-aliasing). Instead, rendering is done on the client side, and the final pixels are then pushed to the X Server. The X server doesn't do anything with them and hands them off to the compositing manager, which draws them on the screen with OpenGL (bypassing X via direct rendering). X still does handle input, but it does so poorly (i. e. input redirection is still not supported). So X is really just in the way these days, except maybe for legacy apps that actually use all that legacy stuff like XDrawLine, Server-Side fonts and all that.

[mmmbop]

except maybe for legacy apps that actually use all that legacy stuff like XDrawLine, Server-Side fonts and all that.

Fedora got rid of Server-Side fonts in 2007, right? I'm not sure if this is the right thing to point to:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureNoMoreXFS

I just noticed that there's a comment on there by the current leader of the Wayland project.. I guess the wheels have been in motion for quite a while now.

[nerdopolis]

Great /dev/null ! My live CD has it's own PHORONIX article! Thanks!

...So I didn't see a link to it, but I do have one here http://sourceforge.net/projects/rebe...x.iso/download
(yes that is the name of the project)

It has QT, clutter, and gtk for Wayland as well as the rootless X server (which the rootless X server doesn't work properly). It does not yet have EFL on it, as the SDL repo for Wayland seems to be untouched since April. It also was built before the rotation patches where applied to Wayland.

I also have some reports of Nouveau not working, even when Wayland is running in an X11 window. I'm trying to find a solution to that in the way I am compiling Mesa.

[bwat47]

As helpful as rotating windows is do we yet know why people will want to migrate away from X? Seriously, I'm not trying to troll: what problem is Wayland going to solve?

And assuming that is worth writing home about (and it could well be awesome), what benefit is that to a wide community like ours where people do use binary-blob drivers like Nvidia's?

Wayland is more efficient in many scenerios, especially when it comes to stuff like compositing where X is unnecessarily convoluted and/or architecturally outdated.

[stan]

Can Wayland run on real hardware without piggybacking on top of X? How about hardware whose drivers aren't capable of 3D (Poulsbo, some Nouveau cards, VIA, ARM, etc)?

[89c51]

Can Wayland run on real hardware without piggybacking on top of X? How about hardware whose drivers aren't capable of 3D (Poulsbo, some Nouveau cards, VIA, ARM, etc)?

I think that as long as you have KMS it will run. Not sure though.

No blobs for the moment.

[RoboJ1M]

I've no idea whether X is responsible on any level, but I'd be interested to see whether OSes using Wayland can play videos without the audio sync problems I've been plagued with on every Ubuntu box I've ever built.

[China_Guy]

As helpful as rotating windows is do we yet know why people will want to migrate away from X? Seriously, I'm not trying to troll: what problem is Wayland going to solve?And assuming that is worth writing home about (and it could well be awesome), what benefit is that to a wide community like ours where people do use binary-blob drivers like Nvidia's?

High efficient and complex multi-effect composite desktop need Wayland,Wayland is better than X in compositing efficiency !