Mir Got An Important Rendering Performance Fix

[Alex Sarmiento]

Cool, i guess Wayland is even more irrelevant for Ubuntu now

[Nobu]

Cool, i guess Wayland is even more irrelevant for Ubuntu now

Nah, Mir is just a bit more relevant for Ubuntu now.

[schmidtbag]

There are technical reasons why no WM/DE except Unity can support Mir properly, see Martin Gr??lin's blog. So Mir will never be a proper replacement for X, simply because of the same reasons you used as argument against Wayland: Mir can not do anything that X can do, it lacks specifically one very important, if not the most important, feature: It can't be supported by other DEs as Unity and a single DE solution can never be a replacement for X.

I thought gnome and xfce worked on mir? I know KDE isn't ever going to be supported, but I think you're missing the big picture - I'm not saying mir is or will be a viable X replacement, but if mir gets enough popularity, (proprietary) driver devs will focus on supporting mir INSTEAD of wayland. Linux gets the bare minimum attention from AMD and Nvidia, and I'm pretty sure they are not willing to create drivers for X, mir, and wayland at the same time. If mir eventually has the ability to obsolete X (in the eyes of driver devs), there is no reason for AMD and Nvidia to support X anymore. That leaves DEs like KDE with no proprietary driver updates; only access to open source drivers, which are not always good enough. This of course is after a span of several years from now. That being said, the open source drivers might be good enough to replace the proprietary by that time, so then there's nothing to worry about.

In summary, it isn't so much about whether or not we the linux community think Mir can or should replace X - if Ubuntu and its derivatives remain the most popular distro across all desktop/mobile CPU platforms, drivers developed by corporations are going to be geared toward Mir.

[RahulSundaram]

I thought gnome and xfce worked on mir? I know KDE isn't ever going to be supported, but I think you're missing the big picture - I'm not saying mir is or will be a viable X replacement, but if mir gets enough popularity, (proprietary) driver devs will focus on supporting mir INSTEAD of wayland.

Actually they won't. RHEL and SLES will ship Wayland and they have to support it because NVIDIA and AMD care about the big accounts and workstation market more than they care about Linux gamers. They will not take sides in this debate. It would entirely counter productive to their business.

[GreatEmerald]

if mir gets enough popularity, (proprietary) driver devs will focus on supporting mir INSTEAD of wayland. Linux gets the bare minimum attention from AMD and Nvidia, and I'm pretty sure they are not willing to create drivers for X, mir, and wayland at the same time. If mir eventually has the ability to obsolete X (in the eyes of driver devs), there is no reason for AMD and Nvidia to support X anymore. That leaves DEs like KDE with no proprietary driver updates; only access to open source drivers, which are not always good enough. This of course is after a span of several years from now. That being said, the open source drivers might be good enough to replace the proprietary by that time, so then there's nothing to worry about.

No, that's not how it works, thankfully. Both Mir and Wayland just need EGL and nothing else.

[bkor]

I thought gnome and xfce worked on mir?

GNOME does not work on Mir. Canonical made something called XMir, which basically runs an entire X server under a very thin Mir layer. Then nothing is aware than it runs via another Mir layer. Using XMir GNOME will run, because basically GNOME will think it is X. Same for KDE, XFCE, etc. Anyway, XMir is pointless. That should just be used to run individual apps under. This has been explained at http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/ a few times in great detail.

Canonical mentioned initially towards GNOME that Mir is not intended to be used for anything other than Unity. A few months later they questioned why we weren't working on Mir, while at the same time repeating that Mir is intended for Unity. In any case, Mir is Ubuntu-only. We've been working on Wayland for a long time. It is very difficult to plan with Mir. Wayland is what we originally intended, it is pretty easy to go with that.

PS: XMir is basically XWayland btw

[bkor]

No, that's not how it works, thankfully. Both Mir and Wayland just need EGL and nothing else.

IIRC that Intel driver change was just because of XMir, not Mir. Running an entire desktop environment under XMir is already a bit strange (http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/). So don't think Intel is actually preventing anything. Further, they develop their own distro, doing the maintenance for a change only needed for your distribution just means a patch in that package. That's the point of free software, you (so also Canonical) can change this as they wish.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Nah, Mir is just a bit more relevant for Ubuntu now.

Obviously!

[TheBlackCat]

If mir eventually has the ability to obsolete X (in the eyes of driver devs), there is no reason for AMD and Nvidia to support X anymore.

nvidia and amd pretty much only care about workstation and high-performance computing for Linux, both of which are practically owned by RHEL (and derivatives) and SLES. They support home desktops and laptops on Linux primarily as a side-effect of their Linux workstation development. If they make a choice, it is where their money comes from, which is RHEL and SLES (both of which will use Wayland). They don't care about popularity, they care about money. And currently Linux only has enough market share in the workstation and high-performance computing areas to make nvidia or amd enough money to care. Ubuntu has some workstation usage, but it is tiny compared to RHEL and SLES, and is something that Ubuntu is moving even further away from.

But nvidia and amd are not going to need to care, they are only going to need to support EGL and a few extensions.