Wayland (X11 replacement) 1.0 Officially Released

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIxMzA

by Garbage • 14 years ago

176 91 14 years ago

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Zenst• 14 years ago

From what I know Wayland is only supported by Intel and AMD graphics drivers, has this changed?

DannyBee• 14 years ago

It's experimental on my little omap4460 board, which means it must support powervr as well.

(I haven't tried it out yet, but Google searches confirm TI is doing this)

notatoad3• 14 years ago

It's supported by all the open source drivers, and AMD's proprietary, IIRC. the only driver that doesn't support it is nvidia's proprietary one.

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

nvidia cards are quite common, so one hopes this major limitation can be worked around. Perhaps we should get Torvalds to comment in his inimitable style on the situation.

dlitz3• 14 years ago

But... but... nVidia makes the best Linux drivers in the world! Etc.!

You just can't innovate using them.

cleverjake• 14 years ago

>> Wayland 1.0 doesn't mark the point that Wayland is complete and ready to replace the X11 Server as there's still a lot of work left to do but it marks the point at which there is API/protocol stability in terms of all future releases being backwards-compatible with the Wayland 1.0 release.

kijin• 14 years ago

Whoever wrote that abomination of a sentence needs to go back to school and learn English again.

werrett• 14 years ago

Mind you if they keep up with the kick-arse-- volunteer --coding then they are ok with me.

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

It could use a couple of commas, but it's hardly an abomination.

sneak• 14 years ago

I conjecture that someone named Kristian Høgsberg (and perhaps his project associates) may not be a native speaker of English.

Here on the intertubes, it's easy to condemn someone for poor usage, however, remember that communicating complex ideas in a second (or sometimes third, or fourth) language is not always the easiest thing to do. Not everyone grew up soaking in it.

This is not an excuse for poor English - but is certainly a legitimate defense against condescending fucktards such as yourself.

pkmays2• 14 years ago

Wayland isn't going to replace X11, it's going to be an alternative to X11.

Tuna-Fish2• 14 years ago

Wayland is going to replace portions of X11 pretty much as fast as it can. Basically, the X11 devs want to drop all the parts of the pipeline that Wayland implements from X11 and move to (usermode) X11 on Wayland.

stephen_g• 14 years ago

It's complicated. Wayland can replace some parts of X11 in Linux distributions, but it relies on some other parts of X11 (like libxkbcommon).

I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in

I also think that Wayland will replace X11 in the way that most of the X11 developers will move to Wayland. X11 will still be around, and probably still be supported by window managers for quite a while though.

1. Wayland is actually the protocol/API, which window managers/compositors and the applications that run in them will implement. The reference compositor for the Wayland project is called Weston.

llgrrl_• 14 years ago

>I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in

This comment must have been submitted from an X11 application running in MacOS X. I am having the s

edhebert• 14 years ago

I'm curious, is the naming related to the two neighboring towns in MA?

notatoad3• 14 years ago

I believe Wayland's stated goal is exactly that: to replace X11. of course they don't mean they're going to wipe out X11 from existence, if you prefer that you'll still be able to use it, but wayland should eventually be able to completely fill the role that X11 currently fills.

pkmays2• 14 years ago

Wayland can eventually fill the role on Linux perhaps. X11 is built to run on many more operating systems.

This is my main issue with Wayland. Whence portability?

bitcracker2• 14 years ago

> wayland _should_eventually_ be able to completely fill the role that X11 currently fills.

Which X11 features are still missing? Does Wayland support X11's seemless remote multiuser sessions already?

I've googled around and found this fresh message from April 2012:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/0538250/update-on-wa...

"... X11 support on Wayland. It's basically ready to go, but window management is implemented only as a hack right now."

That doesn't sound good. It seems that Wayland will have a hard time to replace X11 in the next decade. Currently I see no reason why I should switch.

fosap• 14 years ago

Yep. While it has it good points, it is never going to replace x11 on my laptop since it requires compositing. And i more or less had to turn off compositing on my thinkpad edge since it reduced the akku lifetime drastically and was very noisy.

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

I'm hoping that Wayland will allow for faster direct rendering APIs. There seems to be too much legacy X11 stuff for embedded systems to easily operate in small memory situations.

krakensden• 14 years ago

It requires compositing... so you're probably not going to get any wins in the memory department.

JulianMorrison2• 14 years ago

X11 is fine on machines from the 1990s, with less power than a low end smartphone.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

Which had a very different architecture than current smartphones or PCs. There was no OpenGL in 1990...

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

Well the counter example of that is the Raspberry Pi, it runs X11 poorly while having more capacity and much more performance than the 486 and original Pentium (which are '90's machines). I've been working with a 'Pandaboard' which is an OMAP 4460 system, and its challenged too.

So perhaps we have a different definition of 'is fine.' :-) Have you run X11 on an RpI ? did you think that was fine?

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

I find it strange to call it 1.0 while remoting is still on the todo list. The age of vertical scaling, owning one big computer and sitting at its console, is well into decline.

wtallis2• 14 years ago

Even with cloud computing, all the rendering and half of the other processing is done client-side. Pushing pixels or low-level drawing commands over the network is not the way technology is heading.

ch6530• 14 years ago

The current trend in scientific computing is to put GPUs on the server and push pixels to the client, e.g. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/software-switc...

billwashere• 14 years ago

Whilst I don't want this to happen, what about Cloud Gaming? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming)

marssaxman• 14 years ago

Perhaps they figure VNC and SSH do enough of the job for most people. Certainly works for me... I can't remember the last time I needed more than ssh to work on some remote machine.

alexchamberlain• 14 years ago

Did you use SSH with X forwarding though?

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

XPRA seems quite cool, and not that well known, but it occasionally gets mentioned when Wayland Remoting comes up

http://xpra.org/

"Screen for X"

brian_cloutier• 14 years ago

1.0 means a different thing to developers than it does to consumers. API backwards-compatibility is a very important thing, and calling this 1.0 is a signal to developers that it's safe to start building things on top of Wayland that should keep running without modifications for a very long time.

i386• 14 years ago

Having a release people can start using now to test their apps against and write new apps for is the most important next step for them.

Remoting isn't as important when you have options like VNC to fall back on. Its a minor inconvenience at the most and I believe the've made the right call to ship something usable now.

webreac5• 14 years ago

How could any unix user conceive that remoting is not important. 99% of the gui I launch are remote. In fact I do not even know where are half the workstation I use.

Regularly, I have to give support to portugal or italia, they open a internet connection, so that I can log on their system. With a simple ssh -Y, I can perform all the investigations I need.

qznc• 14 years ago

Wayland is essentially to effort to move responsibilities to different layers. Some things are pushed down to the kernel (memory management, command scheduling, mode setting) or similar infrastructure (OpenGL, udev). Some things are pushed upwards to the clients (font rendering, window decorations, vector drawing, remote access). This means Wayland has much less to do compared to X.org and that is a good thing, because it removes code duplication and unecessary complexity.

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

jdhore• 14 years ago

I kind of disagree. The entire point of Wayland is to remove deprecated, crufty stuff to make a new form of display server. Remoting (in its current form) was on the list of stuff to remove.

If you need remoting, for probably a fairly long way into the future, X11 will still be supported and you can use that. If you want the new shininess of Wayland, sorry, you have to live without remote capabilities.

klrr• 14 years ago

Omg! Can't wait to try it out, hopefully in a year or so we can completly uninstall X from our systems.

jeltz• 14 years ago

What is so wrong with X? I understand that it is a mess and the developers have to work hard to add new features to it. But as a user of X I virtually have no problems.

For the future Wayland might be the correct way forward but I do not see any short term gain for the users.

padraigm2• 14 years ago

Some people complain about bloat and bad compositing performance under X, but my real problem with X is that it's very insecure. Any program running on a given X server can see any keyboard input to any other program running on the same server by default. As it stands, there's not a practical solution to this.

onli• 14 years ago

Two main points:

1. Development of X is slow. Like "the kernel supports switching between gpus flawlessly but X needs a restart"-slow. Users notice this (though I don't know the current situation of this issue).

2. X-window-managers have awful performance compared to Windows. Try dragging a window around in IceWM or every other Linux desktop. It looks like hell, flickering borders and such. Though I remember a interview with the developer who did the first push for a new scheduler before cfq as he quit kernel-development who tried to tune the kernel for this, so this hasn't to be X fault. Just found it, Con Kolivas and http://apcmag.com/interview_with_con_kolivas_part_1_computin... Point is: The desktop of Linux is slow and maybe Wayland will help.

3. (It is always more) That it is a mess to develop for X (and it is) leads to bugs user will notice.

Wayland (X11 replacement) 1.0 Officially Released

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