Wayland, X.Org For Ubuntu's Future

Wayland was talked about this morning at the summit in Budapest. In particular, the outlook for Wayland in Ubuntu and Linaro. Separately, there's also X.Org notes from today's meetings.

I had some other Ubuntu testing matters to tend to, but the notes can be found on this page.

Phoronix readers should already be very familiar with Wayland due to all the articles I've written on the topic and even being the first to break the story about Wayland way back in 2008. With that said, here's the interesting bits from the notes:

- The Linaro project is interested in seeing the Wayland Display Server work there and on the ARM architecture.
- It should be possible to make an unaccelerated back-end using memory back-ends on ARM. The EGL back-end should also function with some work (currently it requires page-flipping and an un-ratified EGL extension).
- A Wayland compositor may be based on OpenWF, as previously reported on Phoronix.
- Wayland is currently in the Ubuntu Natty universe repository, but no other packages are actually taking advantage of it at this point.
- A big milestone is to get Compiz working on Wayland.
- Initially there will likely be Canonical sliding Ubuntu atop of an X.Org Server for compatibility reasons with graphics drivers and hardware as the transition is made from X to Wayland.
- LightDM may be a good starting point for working on Wayland.
- The developers are seeking a good example of an application to run on Wayland.

From a second talk, which I was at, here are some notes from the X.Org talk about what X.Org / Mesa / driver packages should be included in Ubuntu 11.10.

- Ubuntu 11.10 will ship with a relatively "bleeding new" X.Org / Mesa stack while Ubuntu 12.04 will be rather conservative and ship with the relatively same packages due to it being a Long-Term Support release.
- It's not known yet whether X.Org Server 1.10 or 1.11 will be used. If 1.10 is used, most of the new X Input 2.1 work will be back-ported to Oneiric's 1.10 xorg-server.... They're leaning towards 1.10, sadly.
- It sounds like xorg-server 1.11 is a definite for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and not any possible xorg-server 1.12.
- Obvious concerns about upgrading the X.Org Server are due to breaking the proprietary drivers.
- RandR 1.4 is definitely wanted by Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in hopes that NVIDIA will provide support for this version of the Resize and Rotate extension in their proprietary driver.
- For the open-source X.Org drivers, pull in the latest stable releases and a recent Git snapshot of xf86-video-ati.
- The Mesa version is being debated since the new versions of Mesa require LLVM and the dependence on the Low-Level Virtual Machine inflates the CD size. See the Ubuntu CD ISO question.
- Providing proprietary driver updates via Jockey may finally happen rather than locking into the same version for the entire release cycle.
- There's been OEM concerns about the outdated graphics stack found in the Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases.
- Ubuntu will stop accepting bug reports for Intel i8xx. The same for anything that is not Intel, ATI/AMD, or NVIDIA. OpenChrome might be an exception though.