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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."
Thank you sweet Jesus! Finally somebody is doing something that should have been done looooong time ago!
Xorg/XCB anyone?
Then there is that stuff from NeXT which is similar to OS X.
Then there is that BeOS-like server.
Framebuffer.
I think there was some sort of OpenGL server a number of years ago.
Uh, what else? None of these have replaced the X11 standard.
Now only to convince nVidia to release their drivers for this new X. As long as these things don't happen, this probably won't take off.
Man, we really need OSS drivers.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I'm pretty sure Xorg has (or had) the same goals as this Wayland project. Xorg was meant to add all the modern features not in XFree. In fact, the synopsis of Wayland reads just like the synopsis of Xorg. What the hell are they doing?
The big question is: Will vendors port to it? (nVidia, ATI, Intel, etc)... and by that I mainly mean nVidia.
No. This means there another X server thrown into the mix. Superior? Probably. Will it matter? Not likely. It's simply another piece of code to be debated and which will stave off Linux on the Desktop another 5 years.
The great thing about collaboration is that people can all contribute to a multitude of projects. The bad thing is that there's a multitude of projects.
It's rarely discussed because it's extremely slow. Even on low resolutions it takes an absurd amount of CPU power and latency. On high resolutions it's like a slide show with an awkward guest speaker. There's a reason we have hardware acceleration even for 2D.
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There's another project called Y Windows, which also aims to replace X with something that has less historical cruft.
The real question in my mind is whether this kind of thing does anything to address the big problems users are really encountering. Of course, not every open source project has to make large numbers of users happier. But the author of Y Windows says, for example, "I've got tired with the state of desktop GNU/Linux. Most of the problems that I see with it can be traced back to the underlying window system, X. So I decided to write its successor... "
For me as an end-user, the big issues are simply hassles with xorg not correctly recognizing LCD screens, so that it sets them to an inappropriate resolution, or the image appears offset. I have close to zero interest in gaming, so personally I just use the onboard video of my mobo, with only 2-d driver features, but the impression I get from people who do care about gaming (or fancy WMs) is that the big issue is drivers, not the internal structure of X.
As far as programming, the structure of X also seems like kind of a non-issue. Sure, X's APIs are heinously ugly, but almost nobody uses them directly.
The advantages listed by the article are things like a more manageable code base, a smaller memory footprint, and elimination of rendering artifacts. To me, none of those seem like major issues that I was all that worried about.
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What in the world does the X11 rendering engine have to do with "useable for normal people" or the "xinitrc"?
X11, and by extension, the X server, is a layer whose job is to put stuff on screen. That means dealing with the wibbly bits (mice, keyboards, displays, video cards, tablets, pedals, etc.) that cause the stuff on screen to be displayed or interact with the stuff on screen.
Furthermore, it's not like people haven't been modifying how the bits in between your "Project A" and "Project B" work, either. See xrandr 1.2 and 1.3, for example, as well as the countless other projects working on this very part of X11.
That's not to say there aren't problems with X11 and the various implementations of the X server, but it'd help to at least have studied what's actually going on before attacking the work of those who are actually doing the work.
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And forgot that a better X server isn't going to make a lot of people switch to Linux.
I disagree. I think that a single distro gaining popularity will be instrumental for standardizing what is expected of Linux for introduction into a larger market...that is, to give hardware and software developers a system to work in that's more standardized.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The project implements a new X server. Clients (i.e. your applications) link against the gnome library which links against ... which links against the X library, which talks to the X server via tcp.
The X forwarding in ssh works like any other port forwarding: listen on the port, grab the data, send it through the ssh tunnel, dump it at the target port on the other side.
That's the simple version. Add to ssh some special-casing for X, and add to xorg and xlib a speed hack that lets it use unix sockets or shared memory instead of tcp. Not consequential.
Unless the server only implements the speedhacked ways of transferring data between clients and the server, you'll have X forwarding.
Most clients are on the same machine as the server, so implementing shared memory first seems like a good move, but X forwarding is used so often that the outcry would be massive if network capability is saved for last.
Besides, I'd guess that data is transferred in the same format independent of how it's transfered; so the work to do tcp instead of shared memory is minimal.
Don't panic :)
You do understand, don't you, that the reason the nVidia drivers aren't in the Ubuntu (or Fedora) repos are that they're not OSS? Ubuntu will quite happily download and install them if needed, but they'll also make sure you know they're third-party and not supported by Ubuntu. For Fedora, you need to add a third-party repo (livna) after which installing the drivers and keeping them current is simplicity itself. I don't know about other distros, but I'd presume it's similar for all of them, with the probable exception of Gentoo.
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I hear a lot of (I bet) young people clamoring for X to die, and that would somehow improve Linux or Unix.
X does not need and should not be allowed to die. Sadly X11 is probably one of the coolest pieces of misunderstood software on the planet. It is a bit dated and it does need a code cleanup/refactor, but because of proper design, that can happen without breaking the system.
To those who have *no* understanding of X, they should try this:
ssh -XC some_linux_machine
eyes
What happens is that the "display" is a network device. Windows terminal server and citrix, even today, can't easily separate application from display. X has had it for years. It isn't an afterthought requiring drivers to probe and figure out what got changed on the display surface and send a block over the network (like citrix and VNC), no the display is rendered over the network.
X11, IMHO, is one of those hidden jewels in Unix that don't quite get. They focus on trying to make it like Windows or be a gaming platform, but UNIX is a "productivity" platform.
Like I said, I'm all for refactoring, cleanup, cruft-removal, etc. to the codebase, but keep X11.
At the same time, I'm trying to fix some of the problems with composite that we still have in the X server; input redirection, window resizing, syncing to vblank, throttling of animations and atomic, consistent redrawing.
That feature alone would make this rewrite worthwhile. This has been missing from our desktops for far too long.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
And yet for many users they must manually edit and configure xorg.conf to get anything to work, and sometimes they never get it to work.
There are tons of API calls that haven't been used in years, but no one wants to cut cruft or deprecate.
Xorg is painfully slow, and we're still working around ancient legacy code rather than designing for modern systems.
As for all that auto-configuring, honestly you can credit Ubuntu with plenty of that. Try a major distro like Ubuntu or openSUSE and you'll see the installer configure most of the hardware. Now try Gentoo which doesn't autoconfigure X and see how X performs with your hardware.
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We have LSB for that.
Why isn't there a thin graphics layer in Linux, like a framebuffer that supports acceleration?
This is not the reason why it's not done in Linux, but modern graphics cards accelerate some pretty high-level functionality, so your "thin graphics layer" would not stay very thin for long.
Working well for you, I see.
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</sarcasm>
Yes, and you'd have to be an idiot to vote to make wayland the default X-server, when its not even ready to run Gnome. The project could fail by the time its done, or a better one might arise in that time. I strongly urge people NOT to vote for this! It would be a VERY silly move
Networks really aren't fundamental to windowing environments. X was designed around the limitations of most Unix configurations of the time (a single server with clients running on fairly dumb terminals). When real workstations became available, network transparency became a nice feature that wasn't really needed in most cases. The question is whether the added complexity is justified by the importance of the feature.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but your whole post is basically clueless.
Yes, we know that X11 is networked, and that this functionality is "cool". But that doesn't mean that the design of X11 is good.
In engineering terms, the X server is currently a massive single-point-of-failure. Despite all the "coolness" you want to give it, when the X server dies, it kills the many hundreds of client processes that are connected to it on a busy machine. That's a ton of work gone down the tubes just because someone way back coded the X server as a noddy star point without disconnectable links, and now we are still living with that legacy.
The X server is a large program, and large programs always have latent bugs, and latent bugs cause programs to crash in corner cases. That is why X hangs or crashes occasionally when you do something out of the ordinary, or when you stress it too much. One process failing isn't generally too much of a disaster in other cases, but in the case of X it is always a disaster because of all the X clients it takes down, and the disaster is unrecoverable.
So no, sorry, but X11 is not designed well no matter how "cool" its networking may be. It badly needs a rethink for key system reliability reasons. SPoFs like this are no way to design a professional graphics subsystem.
I don't buy things I don't need. What's your excuse for overcompensating?
Wait, what?
You'll note that modern wheels do not have stone hubs. The wheel was not simply built on (or around). The person who decided that wood would be better scrapped the whole thing and started again. It's round, just like the stone wheel, but lighter, easier to work with, and apart from the idea, completely new.
The modern wheel, while built on the same principles, is a completely new thing, compared to the stone wheel. Sure, you could build on the stone wheel, but you'd end up with a rubber tyre on 200kg of stone. Not a huge improvement.
There is nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel every so often. It seems like a lot of work at the time, but sometimes the result is worth it.
theres not much special you could do with that binary, even on gentoo ;) install nvidia-drivers and hope they work.
Most part is indeed getting the X-server to recognize that properly.
Because NVIDIA doesn't care about the five people using Linux on the desktop when they can sell cards to Apple and Microsoft users?
NX does two things that really should be added in to the server. First, it caches pixmaps. X11 was designed for cheap servers which might be memory constrained. These days, you are likely to have a huge amount of RAM close to the display. Being able to store a pixmap on the server would eliminate a lot of round trips. You can actually do this with the XRender extension, but it needs better toolkit support.
The second is that it is stateless. This is the biggest thing limiting the usefulness of network-transparent X. There is no way of disconnecting a X window hierarchy from one server and reconnecting it to another (or the same one, at a different time).
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Plus, "ssh -X" (or -Y) just sends drawing commands over the link -- whereas VNC JPEG-compresses everything. Me, I like vector graphics, personally.