Kristian Talks About The Wayland Display Server

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Kristian Talks About The Wayland Display Server

A few weeks back there was the Linux Plumbers Conference and one of talks was hosted by Kristian Høgsberg where he talked about his Wayland project. We were the first to publicly talk about the Wayland Display Server when it was in its very infancy at being an alternative to the X Server...

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

[bulletxt]

I can't hear any audio

[steverweber]

Originally Posted by bulletxt

I can't hear any audio

I had to dial my sound to max here the chat.

I think we will see Wayland succeed. It seems to fix outstanding problems vary elegantly and add some nice functionality like input redirection. I hope to see this make it into some distros so i can test it out soon.

[hax0r]

Wayland, Gallium3D, OpenGL 2.1/3.0...cool concepts, but with progress like this we will never see useful graphics or good productivity done on Linux.

[unimatrix]

This guy is a genius. I sincerely hope Wayland succeeds. We seriously need a display server with the desktop in mind (unlike the current network-oriented X).

Also a big thanks to Phoronix for the updates!

[hax0r]

Originally Posted by bulletxt

I can't hear any audio

Me too, someone needs to learn how to normalize audio.

[bridgman]

Originally Posted by hax0r

Wayland, Gallium3D, OpenGL 2.1/3.0...cool concepts, but with progress like this we will never see useful graphics or good productivity done on Linux.

I disagree. It's easy to get frustrated when a year or two passes while you're waiting for a project to finish, but remember that PCs have been evolving for ~30 years and will continue to evolve for many years to come. Compare where we are today with the situation even 4 years ago and the desktop changes are very significant. Where 2D-only used to be the norm, most distros are now shipping with 3D-rendered desktops and OpenGL-based compositing enabled by default, running on open source drivers.

Most of the work this year has gone into building a new foundation for the Linux graphics stack - KMS, GEM/TTM, DRI2, Gallium3D - and the big accomplishment has been getting each of the new technologies to the point where they could replace the old code without breaking *too* much in the process. Distros are just starting to move over to this new stack - F12 is first, I guess - and it will probably be another 6 months before all of the work actually gets into users hands, but one could argue that the changes in the last year are more significant and more exciting than anything the Linux graphics world has seen in the last decade.

Wayland was designed to take advantage of all these new technologies - IIRC it requires KMS, GEM/TTM and DRI2 in order to even light up - so rushing it out the door today would be a waste of time because the environment it requires is not yet widely available. Work on the new stack had to start at the bottom (implementing GEM/TTM memory management and changing all the other components to use it) then build up in layers (DRI2 and KMS, followed by Gallium3D and Wayland).

[elanthis]

Bottom-up redesign doesn't make for a lot of exciting interim deliverables but that doesn't make the work any less important or the progress any less exciting.

It is frustrating to some people because Microsoft and Apple already redesigned their graphics stack and got it out the door. The Linux desktop is moving along at a brisk pace, but it's still years behind the proprietary desktops. It is so frustrating because it makes one feel like the choice to use Linux today means you're handicapping your desktop experience to 90's era graphics and user interfaces. What Linux will be capable of "soon" is irrelevant to people when they have software and projects they need to work on _now_ that Linux just can't be used for. It's even more frustrating when even those 90's era desktops run into constant bugs and performance problems on year old hardware because of faulty or incomplete drivers. I still have to reboot my Linux desktop 3 times a day just to keep the screen from going wonkers, and my primary school project can compile and run in Linux just fine so long as I don't mind the broken support for basic blending in OpenGL resulting in a useless on-screen display.

So yeah, it's frustrating. Knowing that someday "soon" the Linux graphics stack will be awesome and then someday "not longer after" the Linux desktop experience can exit the 1990's doesn't change how crappy the whole setup is right here today.

[hax0r]

Originally Posted by bridgman

I disagree. It's easy to get frustrated when a year or two passes while you're waiting for a project to finish, but remember that PCs have been evolving for ~30 years and will continue to evolve for many years to come. Compare where we are today with the situation even 4 years ago and the desktop changes are very significant.
...

Great post, thanks .

[Xheyther]

Does someone know if their is a transcription of this talk ? I've some difficulties to follow his speech (as I'm not fluent in oral English...) but it look interesting and I want to understand what is going on !