Mir Works On Screencasting, Parallelized Page Flipping

While Mir is not going to premiere in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and might not even be ready for Ubuntu 14.10, upstream development of this next-generation display server for Ubuntu to compete with Wayland is still being developed at full-speed.

Last week I wrote about SDL2 landing Mir back-end support and recently was also Mir's work towards screencasting support. The latest additions to note with Mir's development includes:

- A Mir screencasting utility was added. The screencast utility for Mir is very simple and just allows specifying the Mir server socket to use and an output ID; nothing more than that right now. The screencast code now also supports rendering to an off-screen buffer.

- The client platform for Mir is now dynamically loaded.

- A big change that landed this week was the parallelization of page-flipping with the rendering of the next frame, per Revision 1380. The commit explains, "Blocking rendering of the next frame until your page flip has finished is pretty harmless on a single-headed system. However, in the case of cloned outputs, waiting for multiple flips can take up to the whole frame time (as monitors could easily be 16ms out of phase). This left little or no time for rendering, resulting in dropped frames (stuttering) with cloned outputs. The solution is to wait for the page flips in parallel to rendering the next frame." So the big win from this work is better Mir multi-monitor support.

When do you think Mir will finally be ready for day-to-day use on the Ubuntu Linux desktop to replace the X.Org Server? Or do you think they will ultimately abandon it in favor of Wayland? Let us know your thoughts by commenting in our forums.