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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."
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.
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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.
Instead of taking the initiative and starting the project yourself, like this guy did.
Thank you sweet Jesus! Finally somebody is doing something that should have been done looooong time ago!
People have been doing bits and pieces of it for a long time. Client-side font handling, client-side rendering in general, kernel mode setting... Without those things, this project would be a lot larger.
This is quite typical of free software by the way: A lot of things are quietly replaced and enhanced without anyone noticing, and suddenly someone uses all the changed bits to create something radically new.
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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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X is an application. *And* a server. On OS X as well. And under *nix, and even under Windows (when you add an X server to it.)
X's architecture works pretty well for what it was written to do. It was written in a time when lots of people used wimpy X terminals and did their work on a shared beefy central server.
VNC might be more of the architecture you're referring to?
Port GTK/QT to this server's API ? If this server doesn't support a version of the X11 standard, then it's not an X server. Since it is being called an X server, no recompilation should be necessary, unless you're using X extensions that are not supported.
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Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
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.
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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 use X on 32 and 64 bit versions of both OpenBSD and Ubuntu Linux and can't recall it crashing on my anytime in the recent past. Certainly not "all the time" in my experience.
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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.
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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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What was the adoption rate of Y? Was it really done? Was it little more that a proof of concept?
Well, don't let reason get in the way of a seemingly cool reference, though.
That's almost exactly how it already is right now. This whole thread is a bit strange to me since everyone's complaints about X are based mostly on their misunderstanding of how it actually works.
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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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.
"just means it's something else that YOUR X server does. Others may not"
And you took it the other way...
Yes X doesn't have to use a hardware framebuffer, yes you can have X on various other virtual framebuffers, but that's going a step in the oposite direction of what people are talking about here. That would be keeping the X server/protocol and throwing out its ability to write to and manage the hardware. What people are talking about is throwing out the X serrver/protocol, and allowing stuff to write more directly to the screen, have more stuff in the kernel, and reduce the number of abstractions and context switches required between the app and the pixels landing on the screen.
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Window management is largely pushed to the clients, they draw their own decorations and move and resize themselves, typically implemented in a toolkit library. More of the core desktop could be pushed into wayland, for example, stock desktop components such as the panel or the desktop background.
Wonderful. Microsoft Windows works that way, and it sucks - whenever an application locks up, it becomes impossible to move or resize its window (and in older versions of Windows without the appropriate hacks, impossible to minimise it either).
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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