Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • for extra credit maybe someone at x.org (maybe keith) can draw up a comparison between dwm, quartz and wayland.
    how is that in windows legacy applications not written with wdm in mind work fine under vista and up, whereas in linuxworld they have to be ported with toolkits that support wayland?

    Comment


    • Originally posted by garegin View Post
      for extra credit maybe someone at x.org (maybe keith) can draw up a comparison between dwm, quartz and wayland.
      how is that in windows legacy applications not written with wdm in mind work fine under vista and up, whereas in linuxworld they have to be ported with toolkits that support wayland?
      or use xwayland ...

      Comment


      • Games, KMSCON, XCompat, Prod

        Am I understanding correctly that most OpenGL based games won't work until they either switch to using EGL or GLX get's ported to Wayland somehow?
        I'd love to get some benchmarks X11 vs Weston, but can't get any games to start. How hard of a problem is it to remove the X requirement from the GLX side of Mesa?

        Are any of the developers also playing with KMSCON (Kernel Mode Setting Console)? https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon. Should be amazingly smooth/fast transitions between them, right?

        How will you automatically know if an app needs to be run in X Compatibility mode? Will apps just have to request wayland specifically?

        Any expectations who will ship Wayland first in production? (Fedora, Sailfish). (I'm not counting Rebecca Black OS for this)

        Comment


        • Thank you very much for this!

          I was initially skeptical about Wayland. A lot of things are changing in Linux, and most not entirely to my liking. Now I can't wait to chuck X11 and get on with it.

          Now, I could get shot into the sun for this (and probably rightly so) but the transition from X11 to Wayland/Weston might provide a good opportunity to look at audio as well. I know audio is considered a very different system from what X does, but audio is becoming more and more important in UI. After all, aren't the input and output sides of X really different systems as well?

          An audio system that knows about Wayland and works in concert with it *could* make audio integration with apps-over-the-network a lot easier, I might imagine.

          I'm not suggesting that Wayland should do it. But it would be interesting if there were something that worked well with it.

          Comment


          • Originally posted by daniels View Post
            or use xwayland ...
            i knew that. My question is how the legacy windows apps manage?

            Comment


            • Originally posted by garegin View Post
              i knew that. My question is how the legacy windows apps manage?
              By targeting the win32 toolkit, which was updated in vista (and every other windows version).

              Microsoft just does that porting as part of the OS rather than having a 3rd party toolkit. And they spend a lot of money to make sure it's mostly backwards compatible.
              Last edited by smitty3268; 08 June 2013, 02:33 AM.

              Comment


              • What's missing in wayland/weston?

                Very nice article. I've seen some demos here and there of wayland and the rendering looks smooth. I have a couple of questions though:

                I) Are there any features in wayland/weston that you guys have to implement before they are considered ready for production use or are they ready now?

                II) Do you think Matt Hartley from The Linux Action Show will wear the monkey suit? XD

                Comment


                • Originally posted by garegin View Post
                  for extra credit maybe someone at x.org (maybe keith) can draw up a comparison between dwm, quartz and wayland.
                  how is that in windows legacy applications not written with wdm in mind work fine under vista and up, whereas in linuxworld they have to be ported with toolkits that support wayland?
                  There's so much wrong here.

                  First of all, WDM is the Windows Driver Model, and it was dropped when Windows Vista was released. The driver API in Windows Vista is called the Windows Driver Foundation, and the display driver portion of that is called the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), which is perhaps what you're thinking of.

                  These don't affect desktop applications much at all. This would be like updating your video driver in Linux; no desktop software needs to be changed.

                  When it comes to the display server, on Windows you still use the old Win32 API, which hasn't changed in nearly two decades. Changing from X to Wayland is much more similar to changing from Win32 to WinRT - the new library for Metro apps on Windows 8. To use WinRT, you need to rewrite your software, and Metro runs as a separate app on top of Win32. This is a lot like running Wayland on X.

                  You might also be thinking of UAC (User Account Control), which was added in Vista and is what makes Windows dim the screen and do sudo-style account elevation. This does affect desktop apps, because in modern Windows you can no longer write to the Program Files directory, but most of the time this still works, because Windows has an emulation layer that redirects output to a different folder.

                  Finally, you must remember the Vista launch differently than me, because I remember a lot of problems with Vista at launch time!

                  Comment


                  • Oh, and with point IX on the first page, 15 bits is 65535, not 32768. (Think about it in decimal: the highest number you can make with three digits is 999, not 900.) At that size, you could run a grid of 17x30 4k monitors. With that math, it's a bit hyperbolic to say "things get dicey REALLY quickly."

                    Other than that, though, the article is a nice summary.

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by Ericg View Post
                      As far as the AMD/Nvidia issue....I have NO idea why AMD has such problems keeping up with the Xorg ABI (API shouldn't break. ABI does however.) nVidia puts out compatible drivers sometimes before the X server hits final-- they will have a working driver during the development cycle. So Why AMD lags so much I can ONLY assume is incompetence or laziness on their part.
                      http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...589#post260589 (message #18).

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X