Does Using GNOME On Wayland Save Power?

[justmy2cents]

Am I the only one who thinks Mir is better next-gen Display server than wayland?

To me, it seems Mir is already kicking the ass of wayland.
Looking at the video updates of Mir work progress, I notice mir+unity8 is already much more smooth than any of those wayland DEs.

Plus, native X server games(like Dota2) run at same frame rates on Xmir as they do on native Mir. While we notice performance drops on Wayland whith Xwayland.

yes. you're comparing oranges to potatos.

if you think that was smooth, then just look how many white frames there was on resizing to full screen. also, that video had nothing that couldn't be done with same efficiency on xorg.

as far as game fps goes, note the "old testing machine". fps might be the same if bottleneck was elsewhere

[expectATIon]

Open-Source Wayland Window System Running on ARM Mali GPUs

Collabora demonstrates how next-generation Open-Source graphics technologies will provide power efficiency and great multimedia performance simultaneously. The demo makes use of the full breadth of ARM Mali GPUs and many features of the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa platform, including its powerful media decoding engine and display controller. Using the Samsung Chromebook 2, Collabora explains how Wayland excels against X11.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtXQJ0c5q0k

[tsuru]

When there are wayland compositors which can utilize hw overlays I would expect big savings in some scenarios. It is pretty common perf/power trick done on mobile devices. That and taking advantage of buffer-age.

I wouldn't expect, at this stage, any difference between gnome-shell wayland vs gnome-shell x11, since they are doing basically the same amount of drawing at this point. (Ie. I don't think g-s wayland is even taking advantage of buffer-age yet.)

A better comparision to get a feel for what is possible would be to benchmark against weston.

I thought HW overlays were only available in the professional product lines for both Nvidia and AMD (Quadro and FirePro, respectively). Has something changed in recent years? Or have the Mesa crew learned how to provide hw overlays to consumer grade GPUs too?

[bpetty]

Am I the only one who thinks Mir is better next-gen Display server than wayland?

To me, it seems Mir is already kicking the ass of wayland.
Looking at the video updates of Mir work progress, I notice mir+unity8 is already much more smooth than any of those wayland DEs.

Plus, native X server games(like Dota2) run at same frame rates on Xmir as they do on native Mir. While we notice performance drops on Wayland whith Xwayland.

No, I am Mir fan... in this sea of haters.
I am not surprised by these results. I think both Mir and Wayland's biggest challenge will be justification. There will be a decade of development on these things with no advantage over X11. I am not saying they wont get better, but by the time they do... so will X. People will tell you that the code is cleaner, easier to "blah blah blah". If this were a commercial product, it would never work. You have to go to market much faster. You can't tell your customer, "Oh, there really isn't any noticeable difference between what you have and our new product... but our code looks better." Sorry guys. I'll check back in 2 more years to see how things are progressing.

[duby229]

No, I am Mir fan... in this sea of haters.
I am not surprised by these results. I think both Mir and Wayland's biggest challenge will be justification. There will be a decade of development on these things with no advantage over X11. I am not saying they wont get better, but by the time they do... so will X. People will tell you that the code is cleaner, easier to "blah blah blah". If this were a commercial product, it would never work. You have to go to market much faster. You can't tell your customer, "Oh, there really isn't any noticeable difference between what you have and our new product... but our code looks better." Sorry guys. I'll check back in 2 more years to see how things are progressing.

A lot of that is directly and squarely Canonicals fault.

[oleid]

No, I am Mir fan... in this sea of haters.

A fan of a display server? Well, why not.... There are people being fans of stranger things...

I am not surprised by these results. I think both Mir and Wayland's biggest challenge will be justification. There will be a decade of development on these things with no advantage over X11.

Sure there is measurable advantage over X11. Have a look at the video of Wayland on ARM Mali.

If this were a commercial product, it would never work. You have to go to market much faster. [..] . I'll check back in 2 more years to see how things are progressing.

Things are fine, here. The current stable version of gnome/waylaid works fine for me on Arch. Also it's used in commercial software (Sailfish) and it works fine on Raspberry pi.

[Luke_Wolf]

No, I am Mir fan... in this sea of haters.
I am not surprised by these results. I think both Mir and Wayland's biggest challenge will be justification. There will be a decade of development on these things with no advantage over X11. I am not saying they wont get better, but by the time they do... so will X. People will tell you that the code is cleaner, easier to "blah blah blah". If this were a commercial product, it would never work. You have to go to market much faster. You can't tell your customer, "Oh, there really isn't any noticeable difference between what you have and our new product... but our code looks better." Sorry guys. I'll check back in 2 more years to see how things are progressing.

So a Mir fan doesn't understand the justification behind Wayland over X. Are any of us surprised? No. It's got nothing to do with cleaner code it has everything to do with creating a new limited protocol that allows things that are impossible in X, like actually being secure. Please watch this and actually get yourself informed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

While power savings and better FPSes are nice, they're besides the point for what wayland is about, although it wouldn't be surprising to see them come in time. Further anyone who actually cares about Wayland has known for a while that 2015 is to be the year of wayland with previews being available end of 2014, with the problem being not on waylands side but on all of the pre-existing desktops and toolkits as well as other infrastructure required to get things in place which kinda takes a long time.

[johnc]

Collabora demonstrates how next-generation Open-Source graphics technologies will provide power efficiency and great multimedia performance simultaneously. The demo makes use of the full breadth of ARM Mali GPUs and many features of the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa platform, including its powerful media decoding engine and display controller. Using the Samsung Chromebook 2, Collabora explains how Wayland excels against X11.

How well does Wayland excel against directfb? Seems that is a more appropriate comparison than X11 for the embedded space.

I'm sure the Mali X.org drivers are nothing to write home about.

[johnc]

Further anyone who actually cares about Wayland has known for a while that (currentYear + 1) is to be the year of wayland

Yes, we know.

It's on the same schedule as BTRFS and Half-Life 3.

[duby229]

So a Mir fan doesn't understand the justification behind Wayland over X. Are any of us surprised? No. It's got nothing to do with cleaner code it has everything to do with creating a new limited protocol that allows things that are impossible in X, like actually being secure. Please watch this and actually get yourself informed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

While power savings and better FPSes are nice, they're besides the point for what wayland is about, although it wouldn't be surprising to see them come in time. Further anyone who actually cares about Wayland has known for a while that 2015 is to be the year of wayland with previews being available end of 2014, with the problem being not on waylands side but on all of the pre-existing desktops and toolkits as well as other infrastructure required to get things in place which kinda takes a long time.

Yep, I agree. And that is why mir screwed things up. Canonical could have been using their contributions to help, instead all they are doing is adding more work, more maintenance, and more bloat. Because of mir the time it took and will continue to take is much longer than it should have been.

EDIT: Not even to mention that they flat out lied about wayland. They knew they lied, they knew everybody else knew they lied, but they lied anyway.