A Tiny Wayland Compositor Emulates Four Displays

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Tiny Wayland Compositor Emulates Four Displays

One of the Clutter tool-kit developers has announced a tiny Wayland compositor that was written and it provides support for multiple display emulation. This Wayland compositor is capable of emulating four displays and for now basically serves as a technical example...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTQ2OA

[EarthMind]

I've always wondered: why doesn't Linux use the open source X server from Apple? Or does Apple use the same one as Linux? Or am I totally mistaken?

[schmidtbag]

woah this is awesome! i'm pretty excited for wayland to be released, i just hope it won't hinder development for proprietary device drivers. other than MPX, i don't really have much of a reason to stick with xserver.

I've always wondered: why doesn't Linux use the open source X server from Apple? Or does Apple use the same one as Linux? Or am I totally mistaken?

apple does use the same xserver as far as i'm aware, except they usually use considerably older releases, probably for stability.

[Nobu]

Yeah, they use Xorg for programs which aren't designed specifically for OS X (i.e. they don't use OS X's native display...toolkit?), and it is a bit older than you'd be used to on, say, Ubuntu; I understand they might be using a more recent version in the next release of OS X, but it still won't be the latest. On the other hand, "native" OS X applications don't even use Xorg; they use Quartz (which Wayland is similar to, in some ways)

[srg_13]

I've always wondered: why doesn't Linux use the open source X server from Apple? Or does Apple use the same one as Linux? Or am I totally mistaken?

Mac OS X ships with the same X server - xorg. The current version in 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is based on xorg-server 1.4.2, although you can download a version based on 1.10.1 from the XQuartz dev site. That is the version that will probably ship with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

I haven't actually seen any applications that use it (apart from xeyes and so on that are bundled with it, and gimp years ago before GTK was ported to native Carbon/Cocoa). I only use it when I tunnel apps from Linux machines over SSH.

[drag]

X.org X Windows is divided up into two major portions:

http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Glossary

DDX - Device Dependent X

DDX: Device Dependent X. The part of X that interacts with the hardware. There have been many of these over the years:xfree86, kdrive, xwin (for Windows), darwin (for OS X), xgl, vfb, xnest, and so forth. In the X server code, each directory under hw corresponds to one DDX. One DDX may have one or more device drivers. In the xfree86 DDX, each driver is a separate loadable module; in most of the other DDXes, each driver is compiled to its own server binary. Contrast: DIX.

DIX - Device Independent X

DIX: Device Independent X. The part of X that interacts with clients and implements software rendering. Basically everything in the server except for the hw/ directory. The event delivery is part of the DIX.

The DDX that Linux uses is called XFree.
The DDX that OS X uses is called Darwin (for the Darwin OS) or Xquartz (I don't know, but it's one or the other)
The DDX that Windows (can) use is called XWin

XNest is a DDX. The Kdrive DDX, XGL DDX, Xephyr DDX. Wayland will have a DDX also.

It's all based on the same code base, but the DDX is the 'hardware' specific part.