MeeGo Tablet UX Can Already Run On Wayland?

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 22 May 2011 at 10:09 AM EDT. 1 Comment
INTEL
The MeeGo conference is running from tomorrow through Wednesday in San Francisco. This is the first conference for the Moblin-Maemo-mix since Nokia parted ways to team up with Microsoft and ship Windows Phone 7 on their future devices, but there's interesting work still going on in the MeeGo world. In particular, of interest to many Phoronix readers will be the fact that it sounds like the adoption of the Wayland Display Server is going quite well within the MeeGo world. It appears that there's already an experimental version of MeeGo Tablet UX working atop Wayland.

Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of the Wayland Display Server project and now an employee at Intel, is giving a presentation on Tuesday entitled "MeeGo Tablet UX on Wayland."

The session abstract for MeeGo Tablet UX on Wayland is "This session will present the results of the effort to migrate the Meego Tablet UX from X to Wayland. The initial bringup is done and the core tablet UI and a few applications are running. The talk will give an overview of the new architecture of the graphics stack and the changes in higher level componenets. At the end we'll take a look at the current state of the project through a quick demonstration." Additionally, "This session will present the results of the effort to migrate the Meego Tablet UX from X to Wayland. "Play Wayland with MeeGo" is merged here."

Most demos of Wayland running up to this point have just been running glxgears, the flower / fire demo, a terminal, and other mundane examples of applications running within a nested Wayland instance. However, according to the abstract, at Intel they now have parts of MeeGo Tablet UX working on Wayland. It will likely be demoed.

MeeGo heavily leverages the Qt tool-kit and that has fairly good support that's continuing to grow for Wayland. Earlier this month in Germany I heard along the same lines that the Wayland Qt support continues to flourish.

It was last September after talking with Kristian in Toulouse that I reported MeeGo will likely be the first major distribution shipping Wayland. Canonical has plans to ship the Wayland Display Server for the Ubuntu desktop, but that roll-out won't begin until late 2012 when Ubuntu 12.10 ships and it probably won't be until Ubuntu 13.04 when it becomes potentially interesting.

Beyond Kirstian's MeeGo-Wayland talk for tablets, there's also a talk following that about Wayland with using Qt Lighthouse and Qt-Compositor. Here's what the MeeGo conference schedule says about that talk.
Session Summary:
This talk is aimed at people interested in the Meego graphics architecture. It introduces a new graphics stack from Qt called Qt-Lighthouse. This graphics stack aims at making Qt Window System agnostic without performance regressions. Then it moves on to introducing the new Window System protocol called Wayland, and show how Qt-Lighthouse and Wayland can be used to create high performance Meego Window Managers.
Session Abstract:

Qt-Lighthouse is the Window System Agnostic port of Qt. This means that Qt doesn't know what windowing system it runs on, but pushes this logic into plugins. In practical terms, this means that libQtGui will not link against xlib or any xcb libraries. It is the plugins that link against the window system client libraries. This has several advantages, including having a toolkit library which doesn't enforce applications to link against the underlying windowing system.

Also one of the key aspects of Qt-Lighthouse is that there will be no performance regressions to the Qt-Native platform ports. In fact it will be much easier to specialise Qt to take advantages of the underlying platform that could give a performance increase compared to today’s Qt-Versions.

Wayland is the window system communication protocol that is hoped to some day replace today’s X11 stack. The protocol is developed independently of Qt. In Wayland, the server side of the protocol is referred to as the compositor.

The Qt-Compositor project has as a goal to make it as easy as possible for developers to create a Wayland compositor that is tailor made for a specific purpose/form factor. Also by using Qt it makes it possible to use new technology as the qml scenegraph in the compositor.

This talk will give an introduction to the underlying technologies and why they are relevant for MeeGo. It will also show how to create new Wayland compositors using Qt-Compositor.

It was in March that we reported on the existence of a Qt Compositor for Wayland. It was just last September that the Qt tool-kit began playing with Wayland. Beyond Qt, there's also Wayland back-ends for GTK and Clutter, but to this point there isn't much in the way of real-world applications really working well yet under Wayland.

The 2011 MeeGo conference will also have planning talks regarding Qt 5 and other subjects.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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