Wayland's Weston Running On Android

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland's Weston Running On Android

Wayland's reference compositor, a.k.a. Weston, is now running on Google's Android...

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

[pq__]

Actually, "the modest progress last month" was the big thing, as Weston really ran the first time. This time all I did was port a few more clients. Weston is like it was back then.

I guess I should also point out, that Weston has no input yet, so you cannot interact with the device at all.

The device in the picture is Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I've never heard of a "Google Nexus", though there are many devices with Nexus as part of their name.

[droidhacker]

Actually, "the modest progress last month" was the big thing, as Weston really ran the first time. This time all I did was port a few more clients. Weston is like it was back then.

I guess I should also point out, that Weston has no input yet, so you cannot interact with the device at all.

The device in the picture is Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I've never heard of a "Google Nexus", though there are many devices with Nexus as part of their name.

"Google Nexus" is generic covering all three Nexus devices, including "Nexus 1", "Nexus S", and "Galaxy Nexus". The latter 2 made by Samsung, the first by HTC. They started using "Nexus" because it sounded cooler than "Android Developer Phone X", of which there were two; Android Developer Phone 1 and Android Developer Phone 2. Both HTC.

[dalingrin]

Wayland on Android will be great for the future. However, what I really want right now is good functioning X11. I want my tablet w/ it's hardware keyboard to run some type of an NX client or at least ssh w/ X11 forwarding. Running X11 applications natively under a chroot would also be great.

[drag]

There is at least one open source X11 Server for Android under development.

What makes Weston/Wayland port nice is that it's proving that you don't need to have Linux's graphic stack to run Wayland software. It uses standardized APIs to accomplish what it needs. This is very different then what was required in the past with XFree86-style X11 Server on Linux were it demanded root permissions and access to the PCI bus.

(Androids graphic stack is very specific to Android)

This means that you can run any Wayland software on any platform that has the prerequisite API support. So this means that FreeBSD/OS X/Windows are free to implement graphic drivers in any way they please and things should be mostly portable.

Also this means that you should have a much easier time just upgrading your drivers without having to touch the rest of the graphics stack. Currently you often have to update the DDX driver and the DRI driver and if there was API changes then you often had to pull in the rest of the X Server and even the Kernel. For big improvements this means that you have to end up recompiling half the functionality of your operating system. With a standard set of APIs that Wayland depends on then (when the system matures more) you should be able to just update your Mesa libs/DRI driver and be done with it. Even for very big changes the worst case is that it will pull in your kernel, if everything works out.

Which is essentially the sort of thing you have to do with nvidia proprietary driver or drivers on Windows.