KDE 4.11 Beta Brings KWin Wayland Back-End

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE 4.11 Beta Brings KWin Wayland Back-End

With this week's release of KDE 4.11 Beta 1, the KWin window manager now has an experimental Wayland back-end...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM4ODE

[scionicspectre]

Might this mean KDE Plasma could run with reasonable performance on a device such as the Raspberry Pi? That could be quite motivating. There's a lot of cheap and performant hardware out there that's not reaching its full potential with Android being the only option.

[oleid]

.. Originally he was waiting for a stable release of Wayland to come, while 1.0 was out last year, it's not out until after Wayland 1.1 and then Canonical's Mir announcements that we're now seeing actual KDE-Wayland progress.

This is wrong! As quoted from Martin's blog:

Ever since a certain free software company decided to no longer be part of the larger ecosystem, I have seen lots of strange news postings whenever one of the KDE workspace developers mentioned the word ?Wayland?. Very often it goes in the direction of ?KDE is now also going on Wayland?. Every time I read something like that, I?m really surprised.

For me Wayland support has been the primary goal I have been working on over the last two years. This doesn?t mean that there is actual code for supporting Wayland (there is ? the first commit for Wayland support in our git repositories is from June 11, 2011 (!)). [...]

And so on....

[milesmeloro]

Might this mean KDE Plasma could run with reasonable performance on a device such as the Raspberry Pi? That could be quite motivating. There's a lot of cheap and performant hardware out there that's not reaching its full potential with Android being the only option.

Here's a blog post previewing Wayland use on the Raspberry Pi.

[Calinou]

Might this mean KDE Plasma could run with reasonable performance on a device such as the Raspberry Pi? That could be quite motivating. There's a lot of cheap and performant hardware out there that's not reaching its full potential with Android being the only option.

Android would be unusable on a Raspi. It's not KDE's fault, it's the Raspi's fault.

[smitty3268]

Might this mean KDE Plasma could run with reasonable performance on a device such as the Raspberry Pi? That could be quite motivating. There's a lot of cheap and performant hardware out there that's not reaching its full potential with Android being the only option.

I think no. This solution is still using X to run all the KDE apps, and then just copying the final output into Wayland at the end. I think that means that all the slowness of X on the Pi will still be there, and the optimizations of the Wayland backend only kick in when it's managing multiple windows, not a single output from X.

Anyway, it's still an interesting experiment and a way to test out parts of wayland before XWayland is working better.

[Plombo]

I think no. This solution is still using X to run all the KDE apps, and then just copying the final output into Wayland at the end. I think that means that all the slowness of X on the Pi will still be there, and the optimizations of the Wayland backend only kick in when it's managing multiple windows, not a single output from X.

It's worth noting that in the KDE Wayland backend, Weston isn't managing an output from X - it's managing a single output from KWin, which is running as a native Wayland client instead of an X client. The blog post on the Pi website about the improvements from using Wayland isn't specific about what part of X is causing the problem. So if the problem is with the X server being used as the system compositor, then this will improve perfomance on the Pi; otherwise it won't.