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Wayland, a New X Server For Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article out on Wayland: A New X Server For Linux. One of Red Hat's engineers has started writing a new X11 server around today's needs and to eliminate the cruft that has been in this critical piece of free software for more than a decade. This new server is called Wayland and it is designed with newer hardware features like kernel mode-setting and a kernel memory manager for graphics. Wayland is also dramatically simpler to target for in development. A compositing manager is embedded into the Wayland server and ensures 'every frame is perfect' according to the project's leader."
I remember when Y windows was slashdotted in Feb 2004. It sounded pretty interesting. Unfortunately, it also looks like there hasn't been a single news item on their web site since Feb 2004, and their "community wiki" link points to a domain-squatter-ad-site. Also, the downloads match the version announced in 2004.
It's dead, Jim.
I don't understand why you were modded down, when you are technically correct: nVidia's driver stack simply doesn't use most of X.org's API/ABI. There are actually bits and pieces of X that we'd like to deprecate, but we can't because the nVidia blobs need them in order to do their thing.
~ C.
No, Vista removed the most complex bits of drivers from the kernel space. In essence, Vista kernel now controls modesetting, command submission, memory allocation and GPU scheduling. Also, some legacy graphics functions and some parts of USER subsystem remain in the kernel, but by now they are very well debugged and stable.
The rest (like compiling shaders and window compositing) is done in user-space.
X.org actually slowly moves to this model.
Just like on OSX, you have a rootless X server that is a client (an application if you like) of the native windowing system and acts as a server for the X clients (applications) that need an X server in order to interface with the user. So it is both an application and a server.
Kernel modesetting is a good thing, but there is no need to put the drivers into the kernel. KMS gets you lots of good things: BSoD (much better than the display freezing with no error message), flicker-free boot, and X could be moved away from needing to run as root.
As far as the drivers themselves, the best thing for them will be the move to the Gallium3D driver model, which will greatly reduce the amount and complexity of code needed to write a new driver. [1][2][3]
Keith Packard talks in his blog [4] about kernel mode drivers, but this seems to be KMS + memory management (GEM or TTM), not having, say, the entire Radeon driver in kernel. I guess it depends on how you define drivers. or maybe the difference between classic 2d drivers and DRM drivers (I have never figured out the details of that)?
>Today's X servers still support all kinds of usermode drivers, just so that 95% of configurations can thunk it all to the kernel.
All X drivers are usermode. There are graphics drivers that are in the kernel (fbdev), but these are unrelated to X.
Note: I am not a X dev or even a real programmer, but I follow X blogs, mailing lists, etc, and I try to learn as much as possible about X. If I am wrong about anything here, please correct me!
[1] http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D
[2] http://akademy.kde.org/conference/presentation/9.php
[3] http://zrusin.blogspot.com/search/label/Gallium3D
[4] http://keithp.com/blogs/kernel-mode-drivers/
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water