Wayland-Protocols 1.26 Released With New Single-Pixel-Buffer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland-Protocols 1.26 Released With New Single-Pixel-Buffer

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 was released on Thursday as the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland. With Wayland-Protocols 1.26 is the new Single Pixel Buffer protocol and enhancements to existing protocols...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-Protocols-1.26

[schmidtbag]

I could see this being useful 20 years ago or on the most restricted of embedded devices (of which, can any of them even run Wayland, without proper acceleration?) but I imagine this would have a negligible impact on modern devices. Maybe I'm wrong.

[pdbecid]

Still no way to set custom resolutions under Wayland. That and having 99% of applications still running on X makes me wonder if it's ever going to take over. Don't get me wrong I use Wayland on my laptop and it runs cooler and smoother but for must use cases it just isn't ready.

[_ReD_]

It's the small things repeated a bazillion times that silently kill performance on modern computers. So this single pixel buffer is probably more useful than what transpires at a cursory look.

[treba]

I could see this being useful 20 years ago or on the most restricted of embedded devices (of which, can any of them even run Wayland, without proper acceleration?) but I imagine this would have a negligible impact on modern devices. Maybe I'm wrong.

It's mostly a convenience feature for developers. Imagine you want a black background for a video surface. The state of the art way to do that on Wayland is to create a buffer with a single black pixel and then use the `wp_viewporter` protocol to scale it to your needs. Previously you needed quite a bit of code to do that, now it's just a few lines.

[rabcor]

It's the small things repeated a bazillion times that silently kill performance on modern computers. So this single pixel buffer is probably more useful than what transpires at a cursory look.

yes, in a lot of cases old saftware ran nad ran better on unicore chips and old slow ass ram than modern day software on 8 core cpus. if you run that old software, even if it's only using one of your 16 threads it'll still run better than back in the day (probably due to the improved RAM and the SSD you installed it on more than anything),, and also back in the day when games were released they were in a complete properly tested and mostly bug-free state, I mean people would find bugs but they'd have to actually hunt for them, meanwhile todayi f you buy a new game bugs are the rule and not the exception.

People just made better software back in the day. It probably wasn't because they were smarter, maybe they weren't even better programmers (I mean a lot of those people are still making software today and yet here we are), it's most likely because they simply don't have to anymore. They can just puke out half assed unoptimized code and people will gobble it up and hardly care about the mind blowing amount of bugs in it, because everything else has that amount of bugs too.

[_ReD_]

A bit OT, but: https://arewewaylandyet.com/

[_ReD_]

yes, in a lot of cases old saftware ran nad ran better on unicore chips and old slow ass ram than modern day software on 8 core cpus. if you run that old software, even if it's only using one of your 16 threads it'll still run better than back in the day (probably due to the improved RAM and the SSD you installed it on more than anything),, and also back in the day when games were released they were in a complete properly tested and mostly bug-free state, I mean people would find bugs but they'd have to actually hunt for them, meanwhile todayi f you buy a new game bugs are the rule and not the exception.

People just made better software back in the day. It probably wasn't because they were smarter, maybe they weren't even better programmers (I mean a lot of those people are still making software today and yet here we are), it's most likely because they simply don't have to anymore. They can just puke out half assed unoptimized code and people will gobble it up and hardly care about the mind blowing amount of bugs in it, because everything else has that amount of bugs too.

There's some hard truth in what you say, but I'd venture that's also the sheer variance of hardware and the scale of nowadays software (especially games). Old stuff was orders of magnitude simpler, with way less moving parts and possibilities for screw-ups. Also the pervasive reliance on extremely complex game engines—that nobody really knows very well—brings it's own category of ailments which can be also very much transversal across different games.

[schmidtbag]

It's mostly a convenience feature for developers. Imagine you want a black background for a video surface. The state of the art way to do that on Wayland is to create a buffer with a single black pixel and then use the `wp_viewporter` protocol to scale it to your needs. Previously you needed quite a bit of code to do that, now it's just a few lines.

Good to know, thanks for the info.

[cj.wijtmans]

this is X11 level of optimization. Before you know it wayland will be accused of containing unnecessary bloat 10 years from now.