X.Org Server To See More API/ABI Breakage

[ninez]

God, here we go again.

If there is no commits/progress/changes on X people whine that it's old/legacy/crufty X and wayland will have to come to rescue us and save the day.
And if there are changes to clean up interfaces or prepare for interesting new features the same idiots complain about "more API/ABI breakage".

Yup. funny shit +1

I'm all for breakage and i say bring it on I actually like X and am all for improvements, bug-fixes and cleanups ~ and i don't even have any current issues with xorg on my system(s).

Wayland on the other hand, while very interesting, is of absolutely no use to me, and i can't even gauge when it will actually be even moderately usable - and that's not talking in terms of when I could consider it to be a suitable X.org replacement. Time will tell, i suppose.

[V!NCENT]

Ubuntu will probablyu haxx0r up the xserver for the relevant release. Bleeding edge open source isn't compatible with closed source. C'mon... Don't act like you didn't know it...

I thought beer was supposed to cheer people up and add optimism?

Of all the drugs in the world, alcohol and ethanol are the worst in 'cheering people up' . You might want to look into the phenethylamines

[uid313]

Wayland on the other hand, while very interesting, is of absolutely no use to me, and i can't even gauge when it will actually be even moderately usable - and that's not talking in terms of when I could consider it to be a suitable X.org replacement. Time will tell, i suppose.

Wayland doesn't have to replace X for you. It can complement it.
You can run X inside of Wayland through xwayland, and it will yield performance boost.

[airlied]

Wayland doesn't have to replace X for you. It can complement it.
You can run X inside of Wayland through xwayland, and it will yield performance boost.

no it won't, it will work the same, but there is no magic performance boost,

Dave.

[?John?]

God, here we go again.

If there is no commits/progress/changes on X people whine that it's old/legacy/crufty X and wayland will have to come to rescue us and save the day.
And if there are changes to clean up interfaces or prepare for interesting new features the same idiots complain about "more API/ABI breakage".

Exactly. All the experience gathered over the decades clearly confirms that so-called "backwards compatibility" inherently results in exponentially exploding mess of extremely lousy design, rendering the project absolutely unmaintainable and unsustainable.
Nobody - especially creators of libre software - can afford the luxury of exponentially increasing the effort required to at least keep up with exponentially increasing complexity of the project and certainly not forever.
If it's possible to at least limit the impact of project's legacy on it's evolution, I say don't mind the FUD and do whatever it takes, because certain people are gonna keep bitching anyway?

[Sonadow]

Exactly. All the experience gathered over the decades clearly confirms that so-called "backwards compatibility" inherently results in exponentially exploding mess of extremely lousy design, rendering the project absolutely unmaintainable and unsustainable.
Nobody - especially creators of libre software - can afford the luxury of exponentially increasing the effort required to at least keep up with exponentially increasing complexity of the project and certainly not forever.
If it's possible to at least limit the impact of project's legacy on it's evolution, I say don't mind the FUD and do whatever it takes, because certain people are gonna keep bitching anyway?

I will love to see you say the same thing if Mesa and the Xorg driver team were to decide to dump all support for hardware older than Intel Sandy Bridge graphics, Radeon HD 5xxx cards and Nvidia GeForce 4xx cards overnight, since anything older than Sandy Bridge, HD5xxx and GeForce 4xx hardware is considered 'legacy' by their respective corporations.

Will YOU suck it up and upgrade to a Sandy Bridge / Northern Island / Kepler tomorrow if this were to happen? Hell no; you will be bitching like the hypocrite most 'I am all for breakages as long as it does not affect me' people are.

[Sonadow]

The optimism is only temporary

Is it possible for you to give us an estimate on when the Catalyst driver will be ready to support the new API/ABI? Such as a rough approximation as to how many months after the change will AMD finally be able to ship an updated Catalyst driver that plays nice on the new X API/ABI?

Also, will be nice if you can let us know whether AMD intends to release a 'legacy' branch of Catalyst to support the older HD 2xxx - HD 5xxx cards. I'd say these cards are still seeing quite some use today, so a 'legacy' Catalyst branch would make some sense for owners of such cards. Also, if AMD does go with the 'legacy' Catalyst approach, it should be at least updated periodically to ensure compatibility with X releases.

Of course, this is just wishful thinking on my part. But as you said, optimism is only temporary, so I'll hold on to mine for as long as I can until something kills it. :P

[ninez]

Wayland doesn't have to replace X for you. It can complement it.
You can run X inside of Wayland through xwayland, and it will yield performance boost.

I have used Wayland in the last month, i have it installed on one of my machines and am well-aware of XWayland. But thank you for posting common things about Wayland that almost anyone who visits Phoronix or any other linux-related sites already knows

As for performance boost, i will believe it when i see it. Currently, I use the Nvidia binary driver (with X, obviously not Wayland), Nvidia doesn't support Wayland (yet), and thus i don't see how i am getting a 'performance boost' when Nouveau is slow-junk compared to the blob.

[johnc]

I have used Wayland in the last month, i have it installed on one of my machines and am well-aware of XWayland. But thank you for posting common things about Wayland that almost anyone who visits Phoronix or any other linux-related sites already knows

As for performance boost, i will believe it when i see it. Currently, I use the Nvidia binary driver (with X, obviously not Wayland), Nvidia doesn't support Wayland (yet), and thus i don't see how i am getting a 'performance boost' when Nouveau is slow-junk compared to the blob.

Even if nvidia did support wayland, I'd be astonished if there was any kind of performance boost worth mentioning. The driver is already as good as the one on Windows. Besides, the drivers circumvent much of the server code paths anyway.

[ninez]

Even if nvidia did support wayland, I'd be astonished if there was any kind of performance boost worth mentioning. The driver is already as good as the one on Windows. Besides, the drivers circumvent much of the server code paths anyway.

+1

...and As Dave Arlie already pointed out ~ "there is no magic performance boost".