Mir-On-X11, Latency Drops & Other Changes Coming To Mir 0.15

While Mir 0.14 just recently appeared in Ubuntu 15.10's archive followed by Ubuntu 15.04, Mir 0.15 is already under heavy development.

In that earlier article about Mir 0.15 I mentioned, Mir 0.15 is supposed to have support for Application-Not-Responding handling, raw input event support, experimental Mir support on X11, latency reduction optimizations, support for relative pointer motion events, improved window management support, libinput support, and other changes.

For those interested in Mir development, a lot of new changes are landing in the Mir bzr repository along with the change-log for Mir 0.15.

The initial change-log explains some of the latency reduction work, the latency reduction optimizations should yield around a ~15ms drop in total. There's also reduced input event resampling latency by 5ms, reduced output latency by around 10ms by introducing predictive bypass, etc. Further Mir releases are also said to be focusing on lowering the latency in Mir's code paths.

Mir 0.15 also continues to work significantly on modifying its architecture's handling of buffer swapping, in order to support nested bypass in the future. A new "crosshair" cursor is added in Mir 0.15 along with support for 15/16-bit client pixel formats.

The support for relative pointer motion events in Mir 0.15 is also a big deal, since it's needed for first person shooters and other games. Last but not least is support for Mir-on-X11 (not to be confused with XMir) where Mir runs as an X client in a window.

Those wishing to dig further into the latest Mir changes can do so via its Bazaar repository.