The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland

[nachokb]

it totally makes sense, but all the drawing is totally toolkit-specific, hence our suggestion to do this kind of thing at the toolkit level instead.

does wayland / weston require that the surface buffer is specifically an image? what if it's something like a "document" (or command dump) instead... say, a buffer has an "image/svg" MIME content-type; the toolkit updates that svg, and weston delegates the drawing itself to some SvgRenderer (TM) (off-process).

The idea being, there could be many different renderers (so if a renderer gets old, it's only loaded if an app requires it). Thus, GTK+ apps could use a CairoRenderer (it would need some kind of document format, or at the very least marshalling cairo calls, perhaps the Broadway work could be useful here), Qt apps could use a QPainterRenderer, something else could use a PDFRenderer (wine using a win32 renderer :O).

That way, the buffer would contain enough information for the remote system to render the image while minimizing bandwidth requirements...

This could be implemented as some kind of RenderManager which does not need to be integrated into the compositor. But wayland/weston would need to support adding hooks for the renderer.

Also, how does wayland manage the case in which different backends could needs different kind of buffers (e.g. EGL-backend needs a GL buffer, but Pixman backend requires something else?).

Lastly, GTK+ already has some remoting work done with its Broadway backend...

tl;dr add support for *external*, deprecatable, registerable implementations of drawing APIs, and each buffer having a MIME content-type

-- nachokb

[rabcor]

Excellent, i look forward to be able to use wayland.

I've had some pretty rough experiences with X where i've had to battle it just to make certain things work properly, i've had some mean crashes, hangs and whatnot and i just quite haven't got a good impression of X11 at all. I don't fancy the idea of Mir either since i've never been a big fan of ubuntu, unity and canonical. I don't like ubuntu as an OS in almost any way, i hate where it's headed and canonical strikes me as a wannabe apple company. I already hate apple more than any other company out there and all of their recent products.

Personal opinions...

But i think Wayland looks quite interesting, but as the newbie i am when it comes to linux i'm not exactly about to go help in its development nor be a worthwhile tester. So i've largely just taken a break from linux completely after i finally manged to set it up just like i wanted it to be. Even if i got that far it just wasn't enough for me, and it seems theres a lot going on in the graphics server area of linux so i intend to wait it out until people are saying wayland, mir or something else is reliable and good window managers have been ported to it, i intend to return to linux once i can get rid of X and hopefully by then linux will be a bigger OS with better driver support from companies (creative, logitech, nvidia, amd, etc) these mainstream companies revolve around the gaming world, valve (creator of steam) is making an ambitious attempt to expand the gaming world onto linux to make linux a viable gaming platform, if that will be successful (which is where it seems to be headed, many great games have already been ported) linux is bound to get better attention and care from the hardware giants that don't even bother making proper drivers for it atm.

I sortof liked where this guy was going, and i sortof hope that the linux community will learn the things he's talking about, since its been a while since i saw it i don't remember what he talked about, but one of the biggest deals that he mentioned imo is how X is old and how packaging sucks (so many god damn stupid extensions, why can't we just use tar.gz or fucking .zip or .rar like any other good children. Why .deb or .rpm!!! it's just stupid.).

[Serafean]

Amd released last month a catalyst driver with the GLX_EXT_buffer_age extension.

Does that mean that wayland will run with it ? (I've read somewhere it supports Opengl ES 2 and EGL 1.4)

Steps in the right direction, but AFAIK KMS (or some similar mechanism) needs to be supported (modesetting is deferred to the kernel driver now) too.

[mannerov]

Amd released last month a catalyst driver with the GLX_EXT_buffer_age extension.

Does that mean that wayland will run with it ? (I've read somewhere it supports Opengl ES 2 and EGL 1.4)

[farnz]

For the ones requesting link to prove that Wayland uses Delta-frames, it's in here somewhere, I can't be bothered finding the specific time right now (I'm 99% sure this was the vid, either that, or this one with Daniel Stone, which in any case is rather relevant to the topic).

I can't remember where, but I'm rather certain that someone mentioned binary drivers not being able to use KMS due to licensing, I don't recall anyone answering this issue. Among the bits n' bobs I've read these past days, I read somewhere that Nvidia had a workaround for this issue merged with the 3.9 kernel, so it shouldn't be that much of an issue, though I bet it'd all work better with a proper open source driver.

Now I've read quite a bit and watched vids n' stuff, and just when I think I understand everything, I read or watch something that messes with everything I think I know. So, to get the basics right:
- In the video with Daniel, it's stated that nothing in Wayland requires GL. Is EGL/GLES not considered GL-related?
- Again, the vid mentions GLES for rendering, the wayland FAQ mentions GLES/EGL untill a potential WaylandGL library vomes into existance. Considering reported Nvidias Unified EGL driver, will that have any effect on the protocol being used?
- From the info I have found so far, it seems that OpenGL communicates directly with the hardware with both X and Wayland (I'm not at all sure, everything I read tends to give a different impression from what I think I've learned). Does this mean that fullscreen OpenGL applications will still suffer from screentearing?

I apologize if any of this has been answered in either of the vids, or in this thread, but my memory is currently way past its limit.

Just covering your OpenGL points:

• Nothing in Wayland needs OpenGL, EGL, or OpenGL ES. The only reason they keep coming up is that the Wayland devs don't intend to have a native Wayland Accelerated Rendering Protocol, and suggest that you use OpenGL for hardware accelerated rendering. Nothing stops you using Wayland as a dumb framebuffer system, though, with whatever rendering protocol you want implemented in software, and XWayland uses the existing DDXes to accelerate the X rendering protocols.
• Screentearing in X11 is a consequence of X11's buffer model (one buffer per window, composited onto the screen by hardware automatically) interacting badly with X compositing. Wayland doesn't have the same model, and therefore has multiple options to avoid this; I believe Weston implements scanout from application buffer (let a full screen application have direct control of the hardware, and don't bother compositing it).

[UraniumDeer]

Sorry for triple post, I can't edit the previous post.
MonkeyMatt

[UraniumDeer]

Monkeysuit

In case you havn't watched it yet, here's the one with Matt realizing that he might end up in a Monkeysuit.

[UraniumDeer]

For the ones requesting link to prove that Wayland uses Delta-frames, it's in here somewhere, I can't be bothered finding the specific time right now (I'm 99% sure this was the vid, either that, or this one with Daniel Stone, which in any case is rather relevant to the topic).

I can't remember where, but I'm rather certain that someone mentioned binary drivers not being able to use KMS due to licensing, I don't recall anyone answering this issue. Among the bits n' bobs I've read these past days, I read somewhere that Nvidia had a workaround for this issue merged with the 3.9 kernel, so it shouldn't be that much of an issue, though I bet it'd all work better with a proper open source driver.

Now I've read quite a bit and watched vids n' stuff, and just when I think I understand everything, I read or watch something that messes with everything I think I know. So, to get the basics right:
- In the video with Daniel, it's stated that nothing in Wayland requires GL. Is EGL/GLES not considered GL-related?
- Again, the vid mentions GLES for rendering, the wayland FAQ mentions GLES/EGL untill a potential WaylandGL library vomes into existance. Considering reported Nvidias Unified EGL driver, will that have any effect on the protocol being used?
- From the info I have found so far, it seems that OpenGL communicates directly with the hardware with both X and Wayland (I'm not at all sure, everything I read tends to give a different impression from what I think I've learned). Does this mean that fullscreen OpenGL applications will still suffer from screentearing?

I apologize if any of this has been answered in either of the vids, or in this thread, but my memory is currently way past its limit.

[spacetoilet]

monkey suit

i found the monkey suit wayland vs mir on las

youtu.be/FsTQc0ME1eo?t=25m10s

[timothyja]

Please keep the posts more constructive than ad hominem attacks. I just deleted several posts from Paradox Uncreated and a couple replies quoting him. (Thanks for using the "!" report links.)

Will someone is actually doing some moderating please ban this guy and delete all his posts http://phoronix.com/forums/member.php?68972-Pallidus
Just look at some of his posts, absolute rubbish and there are many many more:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?80191-Lightworks-Linux-Beta-Is-Finally-Public&p=328922&highlight=#post328922

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?78301-Linux-Gamers-Make-Up-2-Of-Valve-s-Steam-Users&p=316257#post316257