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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!
...spell the death-knell of X-based graphics drivers? Does this mean that such drivers will finally be folded into pure kernel modules with no fancy wrappers required? Does that also mean that we can eliminate X as a dependency for playing video games, and using Linux in multimedia or kiosk environments?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
While I'm a firm believer in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", I think it is good to see Red Hat developers (or any developers) looking to future needs and being allowed to devote development time towards those needs.
Xorg isn't broken for most users right now, but planning and creating alternatives is a good idea.
For including Wayland in Ubuntu:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15205/
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Uh, what else? None of these have replaced the X11 standard.
True, but this isn't aiming to replace the X11 standard for all purposes, at least not for the moment. The article/interview seems to make it clear that the goal is to do lightweight sorts of things - login managers and screen savers first, remote desktop access later - that don't have necessarily complicated needs beyond being able to fire up quickly, not take up that much space, and hopefully look nice in the process.
This isn't the New Linux Desktop. (unless it is.)
If I understand the article correctly, this is a new X server, not a new API or protocol. Programs would still compile against XLib and still access the server through TCP/IP or unix sockets. The only difference is that the rendering engine that interprets those commands has been swapped out.
OS X *is* NeXT. So I'd say that "that stuff" went to good use.
Not sure what you're referring to. But BeOS was awesome. Especially when it came to multimedia.
LFB is a pretty standard module in Linux these days. It's why Linux can boot with fancy graphical screens rather than staring at boring off-white text.
OpenGL is a standard part of modern X servers. Are you perhaps thinking of Project Looking Glass? That was an attempt at creating a new window manager rather than a new API. It's still under development, but it's coming along at Enlightenment speeds. Its development should not be impacted by a new X server.
I don't think that most of them were trying to.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This doesn't replace the X11 standard. It's just another implementation of it. I guess this means porting applications is unnecessary, except for maybe a relinking.
The chances that X11 gets replaced are pretty small but the replacement of X.Org seems a bit more plausible.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
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.
xclock? xeyes?
Wayland-Yutani, "Building better X-servers"
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
1. it's very primitive. If you've got a VM to try it on, then go for it.
2. As AC on another post correctly listed the projects like this that have come before it. So, before everyone starts beating-up on X11, they need to check out the ample supply of unpopular alternatives.
The framebuffer is rarely discussed as yet another alternative to X11.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
None of these have replaced the X11 standard.
X11 in 2008 is a lot different from X11 in 1998. Much of the X11 API is never used, and therefore you can get away with making a much simpler X-server which only supports the new calls. It won't run very old programs without some sort of compatibility box, but those are fairly rare.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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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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.
I'm still stuck on the Andrew Window Manager.
Shuttleworth said he is going to pay devs to work on major upstream projects. He should focus on this. For one, it would affect both KDE and Gnome users, and it would solve a major problem with Linux. If he really wants Linux to compete with OS X in terms of interface, he should focus on the X Server first.
That being said, I hope Novell chips in some dev support, and that the KDE, Gnome, QT and GTK+ devs all chime on what they'd like to see changed.
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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.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Though before you think this will replace the current X.Org Server, Kristian explains "at this point wayland is just a prototype/playground for some ideas I've been toying with."
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 don't know what you're talking about. When not using network transparency, X.org uses unix domain sockets which are very fast. Given that you've got to do IPC somehow, and a well designed protocol will work just as well over TCP sockets as unix sockets, you basically get network transparency for free.
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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.
Jon Smirl and David Reveman lobbied for a new xorg server built on OpenGL. It got little support from the community especially from Red Hat and Novell. Personally I think this was one of the greatest missed opportunities in the history of OSS. We could have had a modern xorg server replacement which rivaled Apple and Microsoft. Now we have the main xorg branch floundering from lack of interest and developers. Not to say there hasn't been progress made but no one can argue that xorg has the resources available to compete.
Ironically someone who argued against X on OpenGL now is working on his own xorg server replacement. Good luck to him and I hope he has better support.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
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
...or NEXTSTEP from 1989 onwards. :)
you had me at #!
1) NO ONE programs with xlib.
2) X doesn't "suffer" from being network transparent from the point of view of the user.
I don't even want to think about setting up some kludge like VNC to deal with a future Unix GUI subsystem that isn't network aware.
With X, I can just treat a network of machines like one big hive mind. Just make sure to set $DISPLAY.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I used it last week, I needed to change some settings on my MythTV server and couldn't be bothered to walk to the shed (!) so ran SSH -X from my laptop. Yes, I could do that with VNC or similar but it's nowhere near as neat having to run a desktop in a window on a desktop. Remote tunneled X allows me to run programmes on a remote machine seamlessly on my own desktop and is a feature that is used by thousands of people - maybe a lot more - every day. And it really doesn't slow things down at all.
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
Context for those who need it
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.
That's actually a great point.
It's particularly annoying if you have some intermittent problems with, say, the mouse disappearing and the only way to recover is to restart X. Being able to restart X without killing all the clients would change such a problem from "completely ruins my entire user experience" to "mildly annoying".
HAND.
I don't buy things I don't need. What's your excuse for overcompensating?
When it was good, it was very very good, but when it was bad, well, it was a windowing system written in Postscript that let you pass pieces of Postscript code back and forth between client and server to get things done, which could be appallingly insecure and buggy. (The fix for this was that Gosling later wrote Java with things he'd learned from NeWS.) (Postscript is essentially FORTH souped up with font knowledge, but it's good enough to handle objects in.)
Postscript means that WYSIWYG, really, rendered however you'd like. The terminal emulator, for instance, used Postscript, rendered at screen resolutions, and if you needed to print it, it rendered them at printer resolutions, or if you iconized a terminal window, that just set to font size to 1 point / 1 pixel, and you could still see any interactions happening in the icon. My boss was around 60, and constantly switching pairs of glasses if he needed to talk to somebody and also read his computer screen. We set his psterm default to 24-point font, and everything was Just Bigger, and he could just read it without messing around. Mouse tracking worked well, because you could make the tracking happen down in the server without the extra round-trip to the client, so if you had a slow network connection it was ok - you were passing data across the link, not pictures of the mouse, etc.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
a single distro gaining popularity will be instrumental for standardizing what is expected of Linux for introduction into a larger market
the flaws in your biased & self interested statement are manifest. manifest and hilarious.
first off, i dont see what advantage linux has by gaining a larger market. will these corporate interest invest time and code into linux? will they provide free support to end users? will the people joining your standardized Linux gain anything from the homogenized OS they've switched to?
second, how will standardization improve linux's marketability? to what extend to we enforce homogenization? do we enforce a single wm on all users? do we enforce a single office suite? a single programming language?
third, how do you plan to tell everyone they must work on the same thing? do you think everyone will willingly conform to the standard patterns you wish to impose and stop working on the things they think are cool?
Linux's only strength is that it grants developers an open environment to develop novel new things. all I see in your desire is a self interested bid to crush out the free spirited developer spirit and to replace it with something tooled to replace commercial operating systems with something free, for your own good. honestly I dont think you or your desires contribute anything useful to the linux community, in fact I think the desire to make Linux conform to the expectations of the "typical" desktop has been the worst mistake the Linux movement.
Boy are you wrong, NoMachine _is_ X! They just use very clever compression schemes to make it usable over slow connections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology
VNC, Remote Desktop, Citrix etc are just kludgey ways to get X-like remoteness for systems that were never meant for it and it's noticeable because they come with severe limitations.
And for Gnome and KDE being "monstrosities" I don't know where you got that idea from, their respective developers seem to be pretty pleased with them. And Qt, which is one of KDE's pillars, is widely seen as one of the most powerful and easiest to use GUI toolkits. Ah, yes, it's cross-platform as well, which seem to defeat your "broken foundation" statement.
Sorry, you are totally wrong, that's not how X11 works at all.
The client queues up a set of drawing commands (not bitmaps), at some point the queue gets flushed, and for a local display there's a context switch and the server updates the screen. This is exactly how Windows and OS X work as well. The only difference is that the X11 protocol was carefully designed to be asynchronous, so that when you run over a network connection rather than locally, you don't get killed by latency on round trips.
Browser apps are nice in many ways, but that's a separate issue from the display architecture.
Bad things about X11: primitive drawing model, too much hardware management (this is an X.org problem rather than an X11 one, really), a lot of legacy. Most of the things that are actually bad are being or have been fixed.
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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Open an explorer window in Windows. Resize it. Notice the flicker and rendering artifacts. Open a Nautilus window in GNOME. Resize it. Notice the horrible flicker and rendering artifacts. This is without compositing. With it, you get other artifacts.
It doesn't matter what program or what machine you are using. You can compare the same thing using Firefox in Windows and Linux. A much slower Windows machine produces redraws with far fewer artifacts than a high-end Linux box. Since Windows does it better, the must be something wrong with X.
Football Odds
All folks who claim that X's problems lay in it's *ability* to use clients over a network are 17 years late. I.e., they have no clue at all. There are problems with X, but they are elsewhere.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
The X approach to device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVAX framebuffer on acid.
-Don
PS: I do like the stuff that's been done pulling the good code out of X and developing decent libraries like Cairo!
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
198?-1983: V
1983-1984: W Window System
1984-1986: X1 - x10
1987-2008: X11
2008: Wayland?
Sorry, but I won't use it unless it is called X12 or Y.
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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.