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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."
For including Wayland in Ubuntu:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15205/
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
eliminate the cruft
ABOUT F'ING TIME.
X has been a case study in How Not to Write Software for twenty years now. Once upon a time, it was a pretty cool experimental software project. But for twenty years now, there have been exactly two kinds of X development:
A) Throw a layer on top of it to make it useable for normal people
B) Throw another driver underneath it to make it just barely work on your particular hardware.
Project A is fine until someone has to get beyond your little layer, in which case it's .xinitrc hell. Project B is just treading water, postponing the day that we all realize this indispensable software tool is a gigantic house of cards headed for collapse.
Probably some XFree86 dudes are reading this. Let me just tell you I appreciate your diligence in the nightmare of a job you've set yourself to, but the time has come. Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
They'll probably do the same thing they did with X.Org: Circumvent the entire thing.
But if you're going to "get rid of the cruft", doesn't that suggest that you'd want to move to an architecture that depends on the kernel's graphics subsystem rather than maintaining a zoo of obsolete usermode drivers?
Hardware is the purview of the kernel. Or at least the Hardware Abstraction Layer. (Depending upon your OS's architecture.) Today's X servers still support all kinds of usermode drivers, just so that 95% of configurations can thunk it all to the kernel. Thus there doesn't seem to be much point in providing the graphics drivers in the X server. Better to let the kernel do its job while the X server does its job of drawing the GUI through interpreting a series of abstract commands.
As a bonus, the graphical system becomes available to a variety of programs that desire low-level access to the graphics card rather than running an X server.
Perhaps I'm being naive, but why wouldn't a clean separation between the graphics system and the kernel drivers be an advantageous goal?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Xorg isn't broken for most users right now, but planning and creating alternatives is a good idea.
In a sense I think it really is... Admittedly, not necessarily in a way that everybody would notice, as you said - but still...
What X is good at, basically, is putting simple UIs over a network. For instance, I can run XEmacs remotely over the internet, and performance is decent.
Presently, this feature of X is being under-utilized. We're using a network-transparent protocol for the display server, but most people aren't running apps from remote hosts, and applications aren't being written with this in mind.
Basically, for all the overhead associated with something like X to be worthwhile then one of a few possible conditions must be satisfied. Either applications must be designed such that they work efficiently over the network with the present limitations in the display protocol, or the display protocol must be enhanced or altered such that today's applications can run reasonably well over a network link.
Running X apps over an internet link versus a LAN is an extreme case, admittedly - but nevertheless, an old Athena app can do it, while the simplest of GTK or QT apps can have a real problem with it...
Bow-ties are cool.
The article describes this as a "new X server". However it quotes the author of said program pretty much implying this is some kind of a new, non-X video interface. He talks about "porting" GTK+ from X, and about writing native applications for it and a "new, rootless X server" in order to be able to run X apps. All things that would not be necessary if this were an X server.
In other words, this is not an X server.
Microsoft moved the ENTIRE graphical subsystem to the kernel. Which made things faster, but did make them less stable and less secure. (Sun also had an option to take this route in Solaris.) This would be like taking the entire X server and cramming it down into the kernel.
I'm not suggesting anything quite so extreme. Rather, I'm talking about leaving device control in the hands of the device manager (i.e. the kernel or the HAL) and having the X server access the device through a standard driver interface. Much like audio, mouse, keyboard, networking, and storage are all handled by the kernel.
FWIW, Microsoft left the graphics in the kernel. They did add some extra checks to stabilize it, but we're all living with those kernel graphics today.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
We went through the same thing when switching to X.org from XFree86. When will nVidia support it? When will ATi support it? When will my driver be ported?
Why is X dealing directly with the drivers anyway? Why isn't there a thin graphics layer in Linux, like a framebuffer that supports acceleration? Write X to that. Then you can switch your X or use whatever GUI you want and you hardware still works. Freedom to choose, right? The mantra of Open Source?
I remember a bunch of very promising GUIs coming up in the early 2000s that really struggled without enough drivers. "The source is open, just port the thousands of drivers!" yeah sure.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse