The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland

[Ericg]

no i didn't. but i assure you that my actual kernel config does a wonderful job on my laptop( once i disabled the infamous opengl stuff as compositor) both as a speed up and i gained some battery power surplus too.
Keep in mind that on battery the governor is swapped by tlp with powersave and 1,6ghz max(from 2,4ghz.)
this is the config in question: http://www.mediafire.com/download/fa...msungconfig394

Wait, you're actually USING powersave on battery? You do know that it uses MORE power if you're doing anything that lasts more than a couple seconds, right? Time To Idle.

[Ericg]

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

1) Daniel is still working on touchpad acceleration. Also, to my knowledge, minimization, and unfullscreening have yet to be finalized. Those are the only three "Big" things I know about. Daniel may know of some more.

2) Monkey suit? o.O I must have missed that episode

[Ericg]

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...589#post260589 (message #18).

Thanks, Neuro. It explains it-- not very HAPPY about that answer because it is completely incompatible with how Xorg releases, but at least I have an answer now.

[alanc]

Yea, I thought it might be. I'm learning British English, though, so that's why my preference is no comma before and. But thanks for clearing that up.

As a native speaker of American English, I was taught the style of including the comma before the and, and later told it was called the ?Oxford comma? after Britain's Oxford University which helped popularize it.

Of course, being the sort of thing that pedants can argue about endlessly, the internet is full of deep discussion on it, in Wikipedia entries, articles rehashing what everyone else has said, infographics, and crude comics.

[dee.]

1) Daniel is still working on touchpad acceleration. Also, to my knowledge, minimization, and unfullscreening have yet to be finalized. Those are the only three "Big" things I know about. Daniel may know of some more.

2) Monkey suit? o.O I must have missed that episode

Matt said he'd wear a monkey suit on air if Wayland gets finished (ie. in production use in a regular desktop distro) faster than Mir...

[Sonadow]

Wait, you're actually USING powersave on battery? You do know that it uses MORE power if you're doing anything that lasts more than a couple seconds, right? Time To Idle.

Yes, and I believe many of us also know that it stops the CPU from cooking itself (and the table. And our laps. and our groins...) till extra crispy when doing anything that lasts more than a couple of seconds

[mrugiero]

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.

He said DWM... like desktop window manager...
Everything else is pretty much right, but not related to the question, which was already answered by other user.

EDIT: Except for the thing about Win32 API, which is actually the answer given. One does not target DWM or whatever it was the underlying infrastructure before, but Win32 API. And when something gets deprecated, there are still compatibility layers, similar to what xwayland does.

Matt said he'd wear a monkey suit on air if Wayland gets finished (ie. in production use in a regular desktop distro) faster than Mir...

Well, it depends on what you call "finished". As stated before, Wayland developers focus on good development more than in fast development. Unity is a living proof that Canonical focuses first in fast development, and then refine it with time, even when that means releasing crappy software at first.
For them, finished is "kinda works", so they're likely to be "finished" before. Even when Wayland already "kinda works", even when it's only with open source drivers.

[GreatEmerald]

It doesn't have to be a window manager, it could delegate that to something else. It also doesn't have to place windows on the screen. It composites multiple sources into one.

What do you mean by that? Multiple sources of what? You can have several window managers running at once, or what?

Wait, you're actually USING powersave on battery? You do know that it uses MORE power if you're doing anything that lasts more than a couple seconds, right? Time To Idle.

Wasn't it that performance only works better than powersave when on the latest Intel hardware with the latest kernel?

[sireangelus]

Wait, you're actually USING powersave on battery? You do know that it uses MORE power if you're doing anything that lasts more than a couple seconds, right? Time To Idle.

yeah. i'm using it. a 1,2ghz ivy bridge is actually enough to do 90% of the things i usually do. Which is, on battery, browsing or listening to music or watching a movie(for that, it actually helps doing it at 1,3-1,4ghz for power consumption). Plus i'm used to load all the tabs i need fast at the same time and read them later(like, going to the phoronix homepage and mid-clicking the news i want to read) so it actually fits me. The whole pc never exceedes the 9-7w range used this way. I have a 44w battery, so if you do the math it's about 6h tops.Plus, the 1,2ghz limit has the actual ability to reduce the thermal footprint,so that the fan won't spin. I've noticed that it has an actual power bonus.Ondemand rises the frequency too much and too often for my liking( even when core load is at 4-5% it will rise the freq to a 2,0ghz for no reason). And on the AC mode, i switched to conservative because the new intel scaler while giving me the same exact speed of before, it kept the cpu freq to high to do stupid things. Even with the stock kernel, i very ralery heard the fan spinning, while with the new scaler the fan is spinning all the time and the laptop actually gets warm(something it never did before, even while playing battlefield 3)

[TheBlackCat]

By the way, why is it called a "compositor", anyway, if it's actually a window manager? Aside from the fact that you require it to support compositing, that is.

composition
Noun
1. The act of combining parts or elements to form a whole.

And that is really what a compositor does at its lowest level, it create a composite image out of a bunch of smaller images. It takes various images (the windows), manipulates them appropriately (for instance removing bits that are hidden below other bits), then combines them to form a larger image. This larger image is then displayed on the screen.

The Wayland protocol is in charge of getting the images of the windows to the compositor so it can put them together, then the compositor passes the single large image back to Wayland which then passes it along to the hardware so it can be placed on the screen.

It is a bit more complicated then this in practice, since there are optimizations that can be done. For example it can only re-send parts of the image that have changed. But the basic idea goes a long way to explaining what is happening.