Canonical's Mir 2018 Plans Include Some Potentially Interesting IoT Features

When Canonical announced they would be dropping their Unity 8 plans but that Mir would still be maintained, their reason at the time for maintaining it were "Internet of Things" (IoT) use-cases. While not yet clear, Canonical is privately working on Mir IoT plans for 2018.

Canonical's Alan Griffiths, the lead Mir developer, posted a brief year-in-review for Mir where he covered their migration to GitHub, focusing now more on desktop than just mobile/tablet, the Mir Abstraction Layer maturing, Wayland support, and Mir support on non-Ubuntu platforms as the 2017 highlights. No real surprises for anyone who stays up to date on their Phoronix reading!

But he does also comment on Mir's 2018 plans where it becomes more interesting:

1. for apps
We will continue to extend our support for Wayland with further (extension) protocols so that we can offer apps the same features features needed for desktop and convergence as with the legacy libmirclient APIs.

2. for shells
While developing Unity8 we had to “hook in” to Mir in ways that were not easy. We don’t yet have replacement functionality exposed by our new libmiral API, but will build it.

3. For IoT
Our use of Mir for Internet of Things deployment has identified a number of opportunities we are keen to exploit. (But I cannot talk about them yet.)

Most interesting is the third item for Mir next year... It will certainly be interesting to see what comes of these "keen opportunities" since right now Mir is basically evolving into a glorified Wayland compositor. Alan also said "maybe" of seeing the Mir 1.0 release in 2018.

Share your thoughts about Mir in 2018 in the forums. Alan's year-in-review can be found via community.ubuntu.com. There is also our own Mir 2017 review in Mir Had A Wild Year From Nearly Being Killed Alongside Unity 8 To Growing With Wayland.