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Ubuntu Delays Wayland Plans, System Compositor

Posted by timothy on from the differentiation-has-downsides dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Wayland-usage in Ubuntu 12.10 via setting it up as a system video compositor has been delayed to at least Ubuntu 13.04. Developers made progress on running Ubuntu on Wayland (there are experimental packages available), but they need more time to complete their work and ready Wayland. For those wanting to try out Wayland on Linux, there is a specialty Wayland LiveCD."

32 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. What the hell is Wayland? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, I know I can Google, but a one sentence description would've made the summary far more useful.

    1. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by Requiem18th · · Score: 4, Informative

      Wel basically it's a display server, like X11/X.org, except it's optimized to run locally, unlike X11/X.org which has it's origins in networked environments and tries its best to work either locally or remotely.

      Except that X has been tinkered to work for desktop systems for so long that there little of that network oriented code left around, yet W, or Wayland, tries to get rid of that aspect completely.

      --
      But... the future refused to change.
    2. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Except that X has been tinkered to work for desktop systems for so long that there little of that network oriented code left around, yet W, or Wayland, tries to get rid of that aspect completely.

      From the 10,000 ft view it sure looks like wayland is just reinvention for reinvention's sake and is likely to run into a whole host of problems that X figured out 20+ years ago.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    3. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by MBCook · · Score: 5, Informative

      Wayland is designed to fix a lot of the problems that X has. X, for historical reasons, does a TON of things. It has network transparency, it's responsible for input, for setting up the graphics card's memory and registers, drawing various primitive shapes, font rendering, etc.

      But today 99% of the time people don't use the network transparency stuff in X, they run locally. But all sorts of memory has to be shuffled around. X mandates all sorts of bitmap formats that must be supported. Today the kernel, through KMS, can setup the graphics card. We have libraries like Cairo to draw basic shapes. Then there are all sorts of weird things that have been hacked into/onto X to support common features like resizing and rotating your desktop.

      Wayland basically started with a blank slate. The kernel can setup the video card, so it won't do that. Most people don't use network transparency, so it doesn't do that (you can run an X client on Wayland, for when you still need the feature). The GUI toolkits and OpenGL libraries already draw everything, so it doesn't do that stuff.

      LWN had an article from two years ago about what Wayland set out to accomplish. Things may have changed since there, here are two updates from LWN describing Wayland earlier this year.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    4. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Basically the idea of wayland is that by using the wayland libraries the window manager becomes the display server. There are no restrictions on how the window manager works, other than that it is a compositor. The end result is that you can have tiling window managers like Awesome but they will leverage the GPU a tiny bit for the rendering. From an end user perspective there is no reason you should see a change given that the devs are halfway competent.

    5. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 5, Informative

      can Awesome be ported to Wayland itself, so that it manages X clients and native Wayland clients?

      Yes, but with a twist. Wayland doesn't have window managers as a separate process. Instead of porting your preferred window manager to work with Wayland, one would implement the Wayland protocol support in the window manager, with help from libwayland for the common parts. Supposedly the Wayland support only requires about as much code as the boilerplate for an X window manager. Of course, X core rendering and XRender will be unavailable. If the WM already uses a portable library like Cairo, GTK+ or Qt for rendering that shouldn't be a problem; otherwise all the drawing code would need to be ported as well.

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
    6. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wayland is an attempt to remove the network transparency of X... in a world where everything is networked.

      Some people might consider this utterly retarded.

    7. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by fikx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I just realized why I ignore Wayland: every comment in favor of Wayland, somewhere in the comment, will have the same fallacy about the network feature of X being a problem. Myself and lots of others user the remote X feature on a regular basis. I and thousands of IT professional use remote access constantly on other platforms, mainly windows. Using any of the remote technologies available for windows makes me grind my teeth constantly since I was ruined by using X first and know how it should work instead of what I have to use every day. I assume I'm not alone or even just part of a small crowd in that respect..
      If there's some good sources for the % of users who don't want it, that's fine. quote 'em and I'm glad to read up on it. But, most times I hear just claimed lack of need for it when I know at least for myself and many others remote X is one of the most valuable features in X. If there was at least SOME info on Wayland that either left off the comments about how bad remote X is or showed some facts to back the claim, I'd pay more attention. Unfortunately I've seen no comment yet for Wayland that does more than say "I don't know of anyone who uses remote X, so most users don't use it"
      And, one day Wayland may actually catch on and take over the desktop in Unix. Now matter how good it is, it will be a sad day since a useful piece of functionality is thrown away when it used to be included for for free (free in terms of performance cost, free in terms of setup, free in terms of no effort needed for developers to support it, etc.). Doesn't make it easy to look forward to Wayland right now. This comment was at least less inflammatory than most and the rest of the comment was very informative, but I still would like just once for someone to back the claims against the network feature since I value myself quite a bit and have heard many others say the same.

      --
      AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
    8. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For those of us who use the network transparency of X11, its a attempt to 'return' to a simpler less functional time where your windowing sub-system assumed that you were all alone and had no friends.

      A throwback, an abomination. It should have never been allowed to get this far, and the people responsible taken out back and 'dealt with.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    9. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by dbc · · Score: 4, Interesting

      But what about native Wayland aps? (Is there such a thing?) Will I be able to run those across the network? (Asking, I don't know.) Like the GP, I use X over the network. If I can run *every* graphical ap on my machine over the network, then, sorry, no sale.

    10. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by MBCook · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wayland supports X11 in the same way OS X does. There is an X server running as a Wayland client. It would work like a normal X server, doing all it's own compositing, etc., and then send the output to Wayland to be composited with all the other programs/windows.

      If you launch the X client, normal X programs should continue to work.

      I believe they specifically decided not to even try to make Wayland network transparent. I think you'd either have to run the program on the remote host and transfer everything VNC style, or implement your own GUI/processing separation and handle the networking between the two yourself.

      There are people who use X forwarding, you're obviously one. I believe Wayland was designed from the ground up to make things easier for the client.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    11. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by fippo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      you already generally have to use something like VNC or xpra (layered over X, not really using it) in order to get reasonable performance or to detach and reattach remotely. X might seem like the answer until you try to use it... it isn't good enough because it's nowhere near usable as GNU screen.

    12. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by jbolden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree that the "unneeded and unused" is BS. The people who support Wayland are proposing eliminating network transparency in exchange for other advantages having to do with higher refresh rates. I agree with you it would be more honest to just say they believe on balance this is the right trade off. X existed when most modern GUIs which made the same tradeoffs were built. Wayland supporters are just saying that Commodore, Microsoft, Apple, IBM (OS/2),... were right and SGI, Sun, Digital, HP, IBM (AIX).. were wrong in figuring out the right balance of features. Wayland supporters are basically saying that ultimately, even in 2012, its all about ramming as many triangles through the video card as possible, and doing that with predictable timings; that anything that slows down those triangles, like networking must go overboard.

      Similarly X has 30 year history of really really doing a bad job of delivering a smooth GUI experience. That while in theory the network protocol shouldn't cost much, in practice it often seems to complicate design tremendously. X supporters IMHO and experience have trouble often admitting how many GUI projects fail or take 10x longer than they should because of the complexity of working with the X / multiple window manager / multi GUI stack.

      If everyone were putting their cards on the table, then we could have an honest conversation about tradeoffs. Because X servers can run on top of X it might be possible to even come to an agreement about which applications should remain network transparent and which shouldn't. I suspect most supporters of network transparency could care less if games and video editing software went local only. And I suspect that most supporters of wayland could care less if server monitoring and server installation software remained X forever. Longer term though the tradeoffs become real. Gnome and KDE will either be built around Wayland or built around X, its going to be impossible for them to do both well. If around Wayland then Linux will be a system of local GUIs with at best a few networkable applications. If around X then Wayland will be a hack run in place of the GUI or only in full screen mode, for real time rendering.

    13. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, No, yes and maybe. FAQ is useful. http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    14. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Wayland developers have repeatedly said they will support network transparency. Stop being a fucking drama queen.

      Their FAQ disagrees with you:

      Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

      No, that is outside the scope of Wayland.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    15. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by ais523 · · Score: 4, Informative

      ssh -X has some restrictions for security reasons. If you trust the other end, try using ssh -Y instead, which lets it do things like run code on the local GPU (which OpenGL probably cares about).

      --
      (1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
    16. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by mellyra · · Score: 5, Informative

      Wayland is an attempt to remove the network transparency of X... in a world where everything is networked.

      I just don't get why they are so keen to get rid off that faeture... When I was in uni (just four years ago) our department had a powerful Sun server that mostly powered the computer lab's thin clients but also allowed ssh access from the outside. Being able to log into that server via ssh with X forwarding and run Maple, Mathematica, ... was awesome and saved me the expense of getting any of that software myself.

    17. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by gaelfx · · Score: 4, Informative

      Nice job clipping that response to suit your needs. If you bothered to read the second paragraph:

      This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.

      Now, call me crazy, but isn't a large part of Linux about the user being able to choose how their machine does the work that they ask it to do? It seems to me Wayland isn't trying to force anything on anyone, rather, just trying to open up more choices that would otherwise be limited.

    18. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by jbolden · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In my experience, the hard parts of making GUI code are dealing with multiple platforms (why would you want to write code for a single platform?) and going from functional-but-dull to snazzy-and-usable. The networking side of things (or not) is nowhere on that map.

      I don't write software where I have to push large numbers of frames through per second either. On the other hand I use software where large numbers of frames per second matter. Interestingly enough I just got the mac retina. Because the retina is doing virtual adjustments (i.e. there are several virtual screens being drawn to by applications and those those are re-rendered to another virtual screen which gets pushed to the physical screen) I could easily see frame rate problems in even day to applications like video inside a web browser while scrolling before the driver improvements in OSX 10.8. What Apple did in 10.8 to get rid of those problems, would be impossible under X.

      Kristian Høgsberg who wrote a lot of the X acceleration you are probably using was the one who started Wayland. He was frustrated about what he couldn't do. Under X applications are not able to control rendering. They cannot make decisions required to avoid visible tearing. They cannot force the X client to draw potential windows in advance to avoid lag.

      Another problem is either the client and server (to use X terminology) share a video memory buffer or they don't. If they don't you pick up a lot of time passing information between them. Your CPU is probably no more than a few gigabytes per second, that is the maximum speed you can get data from one buffer to another under best conditions. And with screens that are 5 mega pixel x 4 bytes of color per pixel, every one way trip is is 1/100th of a second under perfect conditions. You aren't getting perfect conditions and 2 round trips is common. And if X wanted to implement something like the resolution system Apple for retina then it would be worse (though the CPU speed for memory is likely about double) because you could be rendering virtual screens as large as 14 megapixel with some round trip being 4 hops.... you could be talking flicker over 1/10th of a second.

      I hope these two examples help. They have a good discussion: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

    19. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by EvilNTUser · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If everyone were putting their cards on the table, then we could have an honest conversation about tradeoffs.

      Sometimes it seems like people don't even know what cards they're holding. All these arguments are missing the point from a usability perspective.

      When I type "ssh -X", I don't actually care what protocol is used. All I care about is that it works on every single computer *by default*. The solution is obvious: modify the Wayland spec to demand that every system that implements Wayland also includes VNC integrated with SSH. Problem solved, everyone can be happy.

      Yes, performance won't be exactly the same, the specified protocol might not end up being VNC, etc. but these endless arguments about Wayland are much worse. We have the software to implement this, so let's just please standardize on *something* so we have usable systems out of the box. It's not going to prevent someone from manually installing a better network protocol in the future, so Wayland trying to remain neutral on network protocols is just ideological posturing.

      --
      My Sig: SEGV
    20. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by grumbel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I just don't get why they are so keen to get rid off that faeture...

      They are not. This is not about replacing X, it's simply about splitting the graphics and input code out of X and moving it over to the kernel and Wayland. You can still run X11 apps under Wayland. So it's really more a pragmatic approach to getting the Xorg code based cleaned up, then an abandonment of network transparencey.

      Also in general X11 network transparency is bit overrated in my opinion, as while it is good for things such as basic thin client computing, it is completely useles for basic everyday uses like screen sharing or moving applications from one display to another. It's also rather useless for multimedia, be it video due to the lack of bandwidth or sound due to the X11 simply not handling sound. Wayland won't solve them, but a clean code base means that it will be easier for other people to attack those problems.

    21. Re:What the hell is Wayland? by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nope. While a small minority of loud retards were repeating other people's outdated arguments, most of the rest of the world recreated the network transparency of X. Now you have a corporate environment where doing Unix-y things from 20 years ago is commonplace.

      As much as I despise Windows, it does do the remote desktop thing well enough to be useful. I can't say the same for Macs.

      The rest of the world has finally caught up with X. It's the people that want to dump X that are really living in the past.

      It turns out that in a highly networked world, network transparency is actually a very handy thing. Dumping it just because you're an Apple wannabe is just stupid.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  2. Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Every time I see a screenshot of Wayland, I see rotated windows. Is that its only feature?

    1. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      http://wayland.freedesktop.org/screenshots.html

      Try harder.

    2. Re:Sigh by nzac · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's so far from ready, this is what its currently achieving. When you are remaking a compositor from the begging these are significant steps.

      I have been waiting from this announcement from Ubuntu since they said they were trying to use it next release. It might be close to being ok for a 2d no accel window manager but trying to run unity was never happening in 6 months.

  3. Did the grownups prevail this time? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The usual Ubuntu practice is to jam incomplete, beta quality changes (grub2, upstart, plymouth, unity, etc.) into release and fix them them in subsequent
    releases. This decision is a welcome change.

    Or maybe Wayland is so un-ready that even the usual Ubuntu powers-that-be couldn't allow it to be foisted on users, in which case we'll see beta quality Wayland in 13.04.

    I'm betting on #2.

    Not that I'm complaining, but there is wisdom in adopting realistic expectations.

    1. Re:Did the grownups prevail this time? by oakgrove · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If Linux ever comes to dominate the desktop it'll be in some form that just comes out of nowhere the way Android did* and made Linux a huge force in the mobile space. Windows would be a lot harder to displace than the iPhone though.

      *Yes to people on here Android was old hat by the time it actually appeared but to most consumers it just appeared out of nowhere one day in 2008.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    2. Re:Did the grownups prevail this time? by MBCook · · Score: 5, Informative

      My understanding of Wayland says that it wouldn't bother Valve at all.

      If you use a toolkit that has been ported to Wayland, you use the toolkit and nothing changes.

      If you use a toolkit that hasn't been ported, you'd just run the X server that runs as a Wayland client, so things keep working.

      But the important thing is running OpenGL, which works just fine in Wayland (which is built on OpenGL).

      Unless Valve is writing their own rendering directly against X (which seems like it would be an idiotic thing to do in general, especially considering Wayland has been coming for over 2 years), I wouldn't think this would really effect them. In fact, they could decide to go Wayland only (assuming it's done enough at that point) and avoid whatever hassle X might have given them.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  4. Just be patient by asmkm22 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Things will get better once the Yutani Corporation enters the picture.

  5. Re:Anyone on /. Actually Use Ubuntu? by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I thought this was a hardcore tech site, but Ubuntu is a pile of crap, and anyone who has tried other distros (crap like CentOS doesn't count) usually likes the other distros better. Debian, Archlinux, Gentoo - these are distros that don't suck, don't go into dependency hell every upgrade, and don't make a gui for everything, with ads and daemons and useless crapp tossed in.

    I don't see choosing some particular distro that important. They all carry mostly the same software and have somewhat similar mechanisms for package management and maintaining the system.

  6. Re:First Microsoft and now Canonical... by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wayland has little to do with GUIs; it's the software layer underneath the graphics.

  7. Re:Why not replace X11 with... nothing? by agrif · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is almost exactly what Wayland is doing. Wayland is a communication protocol between compositors and the things they composite: usually, between window managers and applications. This means that the window manager is responsible for communicating with applications, and for pushing video data on to the screen (via OpenGL + Kernel Mode Setting). So instead of launching X, then launching a window manager on top of that, you just launch the window manager.

    This is the primary advantage of Wayland: it's simple. Really really simple. It's basically just OpenGL and a protocol for delegating render surfaces to other applications (to render on to using OpenGL). By comparison, an X server needs font rendering, shape rendering, and a ton of other things that aren't used today anyway because everyone uses freetype and cairo and such. Wayland leaves those out and expects you to get that from other places (like, say, freetype and cairo).

    (Wayland is also the name of a C library implementing the Wayland protocol. The Wayland project also produces the Weston compositor, as a reference implementation of a simple "window manager".)