The First Wayland Benchmarks From Fedora 20 Show Great Promise

[Ren H?ek]

Didn't the Wayland devs claim XWayland would be faster than native X.Org by passing complex things?
It is slower!

This testing is similar in nature to our original Ubuntu XMir testing of comparing Ubuntu Linux with a Mir/XMir instance running versus an X.Org Server without anything else. The current XMir performance has improved thanks in large part to the composite bypass support, but already the test results in this article show the XWayland performance with common Linux-native OpenGL workloads being quite good.

The reason is mentioned in the article, you are commenting on...

[uid313]

Didn't the Wayland devs claim XWayland would be faster than native X.Org by passing complex things?
It is slower!

I hope further Wayland and XWayland tweaks makes it faster.

Would also be nice to see a comparison against XMir.

[MartinN]

How nice! A fellow LAS fan.

On-topic:
I almost get goosebumps when I think about how close we are to a X-less desktop. Unfortunately I'll probably have to leave Xfce for GNOME. Let's hope Classic works.

X11 dependencies are in 69 out of 601 *.c files in the XFCE 4.1 sources (the top tarball expanded, then the sub-tarballs expanded from that one). I did not grep the *.h files. The rest of it is very much GTK-centric....

So while it looks 'bad', it's a manageable effort to port one of the sweeter-looking DEs completely over to GTK, if they really chose to do it....100% XFCE on Wayland/GTK... definitely has a nice ring to it.

This also re-iterates the importance of getting XWayland stable/merged, hopefully into X 1.15. Ignoring XWayland will only hinder Wayland/Weston/et al adoption.

[rangnar]

Core i7-4750HQ has 4 Cores

Just for the record: The Intel Core i7-4750HQ has 4 cores and is capable to run 8 threads. But you can, of course, force Intel to correct the ARK entry to 8 cores.

http://ark.intel.com/products/76087/

[mrugiero]

Depends on how much overhead you mean. Displays can only display SO much so if the overhead means the display can push at max 295fps, instead of 300fps, I don't see a problem there. Especially since most displays will cap at 60fps, and gaming displays cap around 120fps. I get your point about overhead, and we should look to find ways to minimize said overhead, but enough abstraction as necessary to provide multiple backends is likely a good idea

Yes, it is now, that there are reasons to expect multiple backends. But there really wasn't any, back when xfwm4 (or almost any of the other X window managers) was written.

[Ericg]

Abstraction also means bigger overhead, so as long as there is a single option for a long time, the abstraction should, IMO, be avoided. You will lose less time porting than the time all this overhead will sum up.
I'm not against abstracting against OSes, since there will always be several options, but windowing systems for *NIX OSes? There is usually one at a time that actually gets used, with the exception of the Apple world having it's own Quartz. But if you are there, you probably like their GUIs already and don't want to switch.

Depends on how much overhead you mean. Displays can only display SO much so if the overhead means the display can push at max 295fps, instead of 300fps, I don't see a problem there. Especially since most displays will cap at 60fps, and gaming displays cap around 120fps. I get your point about overhead, and we should look to find ways to minimize said overhead, but enough abstraction as necessary to provide multiple backends is likely a good idea

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Truly hilarious reading the whining of people discussing performance of a compositing engine, etc., that doesn't have 30 years of kruft under it, but only a few years from concept to inception.

In 18 months 90% of the community will be dumping Xorg and using Wayland/Weston.

[mrugiero]

True, but this whole thing (changing window systems) has been a lesson for every involved. Abstraction. Abstraction. Abstraction. X11 was around for what? Almost 30years? Its not surprising that people just assumed it'd be around for awhile and wrote directly against X. But now we've learned that things change, things DO change, and we need to change with them.

And while I get that you can't help but sometimes right directly against the window system (obviously, for something that low level you will have to) but the lesson then is that FOR the low level stuff, don't tie ENTIRELY to THAT window system. Make it be a 'backend' system so that its maintainable in the future and you can just pop in a new backend if you need to.

Abstraction also means bigger overhead, so as long as there is a single option for a long time, the abstraction should, IMO, be avoided. You will lose less time porting than the time all this overhead will sum up.
I'm not against abstracting against OSes, since there will always be several options, but windowing systems for *NIX OSes? There is usually one at a time that actually gets used, with the exception of the Apple world having it's own Quartz. But if you are there, you probably like their GUIs already and don't want to switch.

[Ericg]

I don't want to be a party pooper, but porting to GTK3 alone won't magically make XFCE work on Wayland, as some parts (namely, xfwm4) talk directly to X11.

True, but this whole thing (changing window systems) has been a lesson for every involved. Abstraction. Abstraction. Abstraction. X11 was around for what? Almost 30years? Its not surprising that people just assumed it'd be around for awhile and wrote directly against X. But now we've learned that things change, things DO change, and we need to change with them.

And while I get that you can't help but sometimes right directly against the window system (obviously, for something that low level you will have to) but the lesson then is that FOR the low level stuff, don't tie ENTIRELY to THAT window system. Make it be a 'backend' system so that its maintainable in the future and you can just pop in a new backend if you need to.

[intellivision]

How nice! A fellow LAS fan.

On-topic:
I almost get goosebumps when I think about how close we are to a X-less desktop. Unfortunately I'll probably have to leave Xfce for GNOME. Let's hope Classic works.

Gnome Classic functions okay, but compared to the speed and responsiveness of Xfce it's got nothing.
Wayland is still over two years away from being production ready anyway, there aren't any EGL blobs for it yet so performance will be limited and it's technically supported by only two compositors, Mutter and Weston. All others are simply forks of the aforementioned two or are largely incomplete.
You're better off sticking with X11 until these issues have been addressed.