Mir Display Server Now Supports VT Switching

While there was the video of Unity Next running on Mir with a Google Nexus 4 hand-held, in terms of the overall feature completeness of the Mir Display Server, there is still much work ahead. Only on Friday did Mir even gain support for switching to virtual terminals.

For those not closely following Mir's Bazaar repository, it was only on Friday with revision 585 that support for VT switching was committed.

From the commit message, it doesn't sound like Ubuntu will support VT switching for their new mobile infatuation, but rather more broadly it's introducing pause/resume concepts for Mir.

server,gbm: Support VT switching

Since VT switching is a desktop specific concept at the moment, this branch introduces it in more generic terms, as pause/resume in the high level interfaces. Note that the mechanisms that implement pausing/resuming are not tied to VT switching in particular. We can reuse them to pause/resume arbitrarily.

In order for VT switching (pause/resume) to work properly, mir needs to be run with root privileges, since this is required for drm{Drop,Set}Master(). However, if no VT switch (pause/resume) is performed, mir can be happily run without root priveleges (as before, assuming appropriate device permissions).

As another interesting tid bit, for those that didn't read Jolla Brings Wayland Atop Android GPU Drivers and the blog post, there was an interesting message not explicitly mentioned in the earlier article. Carsten Munk, the Chief Research Engineer at Jolla, wrote:

Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.

That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.

But, I will say that their behavior has improved - they are now participating in the project, discussing, upstreaming patches that are useful. And I forgive them because they've changed their ways and are participating sanely now.