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Jolla Ports Wayland To Android GPU Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "A Jolla Sailfish OS engineer has ported Wayland to run on Android GPU drivers. The implementation uses libhybis with the Android driver so that the rest of the operating system can be a conventional glibc-based Linux operating system, such as Mer / Sailfish OS. The code is to be LGPL licensed. The reported reasoning for making Wayland support Android GPU drivers was difficulty in ODM vendors not wishing to offer driver support for platforms aside from Android."
The reported reasoning for making Wayland support Android GPU drivers was difficulty in ODM vendors not wishing to offer driver support for platforms aside from Android."
Why support yesterday's phone when you can just tell your users to buy tomorrow's? This kind of progressive thinking hurts profits. Profits are people. Therefore, you should be arrested. :/
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Jolla is a bunch of x-Nokia engineers continuing the work Nokia was doing on MeeGo. The name of their version of MeeGo is Sailfish. Wayland is a next generation display manager similar to Aqua on Mac that is currently looking to replace some of X11's functionality. Jolla ported the Android drivers over to Wayland so that Sailfish can run on GPUs designed for Android. This allows Jolla to buy off the shelf (cheap) GPUs and run Sailfish on it i.e. keep hardware parts costs down.
The use of inexpensive hardware means that Jolla is not going to be only at higher price points. They are producing a mainstream phone and there had been debate about that. This is important because we now for sure that Sailfish is going with Wayland unlike MeeGo which used a more primitive direct system.
In short
a) Wayland is cool
b) Sailfish is cool
c) Jolla is cool
So all around a classic /. news for nerds story.
Wayland is an alternative windowing system for *nix OSes; a counterpart to Xorg, Xfree86, X11, and pals. While the others are all based on the original X windowing system, Wayland is simply different in that respect.
The story is about successfully porting the Wayland windowing system to be able to work with android flavored GPU drivers, presumably because many SoC makers only target Android as a platform.
Why?
Suppose you want to build a custom *nix flavored tablet distro to run on these smexxy new atom and arm cpus hitting the market, and the SoC solutions look attractive. "Oh noez!" You shout in exasperation "they won't gives me duh sourcez codez! I cannuh compile native kernal driverz an shitz!"
With this hybrid mashup, this port of Wayland can use the vendor created android drivers out of the box, making the tight fisted "no, our precious can't be shared! Bad Linuxesss.. Bad!" Behavior coming from nVidia and Broadcom in respect to this issue, much less of a showstopper, and more of just a petty annoyance.
I read through the title, and the entire summary, and I still haven't got a clue what the story is all about. Jolla? Wayland? ODM Vendors? Yes, I could google, but come on! These are not common terms. Throw us a bone.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The reported reasoning for making Wayland support Android GPU drivers was difficulty in ODM vendors not wishing to offer driver support for platforms aside from Android.
ODMs don't know how to write software, so you're better off not asking them to; the result would just be garbage anyway. All the GPU drivers are actually written by the GPU IP vendors (Qualcomm, Imagination, ARM, etc.) and they only provide Android drivers. You could try to pay them to write KMS/DRM drivers, but they'd probably quote you a price in the millions which minority platform wannabes like Jolla could not afford anyway.
Thank you my man. Yes, I could have googled that information (actually I did after posting), but I wanted to make the point about how incomprehensible the summary was as posted. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who thinks Jolla, Sailfish and Wayland aren't exactly household names.
And
d) They just made Mir even more redundant.
The only thing Mir had going to it was that it was Wayland with Android drivers.
Agreed. Jolla is way ahead of Canonical. And their people know a lot more about the phone business. I'd need really good odds to put money on Mir in that fight.
a) Wayland is cool /. news for nerds story.
b) Sailfish is cool
c) Jolla is cool
So all around a classic
I really only have one question... why are all these open source projects named after ex-girlfriends?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I agree. If you aren't following both phones and LInux that summary had undefined vocab. And even if someone understood what the works meant it wasn't clear why the port mattered.
Sailfish runs Android apps and has a better interface. I could see Jolla being bought by Motorola or HTC or Sony as a way to get back into the game against Samsung. I could also see Samsung buying them if Tizen doesn't work out for Samsung.
If I had to guess 25% Sailfish is picked up by a mainstream brand by 2018.
Wayland is pretty heavily represented here, but Jolla and sailfish I remember only seeing once, and it was a while ago, and I didn't remember.
but, I personally like this site because I don't need to wade through parenthetocals while reading summaries of tech stories, I would of benefited from context here, but It's the price I pay for all the countless times I benefit from lack of such.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
While the last two clearly sound like stripper/porno names, like "candi", .....
Seriously, you had an ex girlfriend named... Wayland?
Did "she" have stubble too?
Medusa is cool too. Don't be a bitch and forget about Medusa.
Correction:
They ported (wrote a new backend for) Wayland to sit atop Android drivers (which will sit atop Android hardware).
Your conclusions are right: Linux apps (on toolkits with Wayland ports) can now run on this.
This has nothing to do with running Android apps. Though getting a great display manager on Android hardware is a good first step if that's where you're going. You'd still need the whole Android subsystem with adapters (AudioFlinger APIs in Alsa or whatever sound subsystem they use, SurfaceFlinger APIs on Wayland).
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Well, just from the summary it says they ported Wayland to run on Android GPU drivers, so I assume that the point is not to run Wayland on Android but to use Android's GPU drivers for Sailfish OS. That would make sense because trying to persuade hardware vendors to make a whole new driver branch for a yet-unproven OS is not something most developers would look forward to. At least that's just my impression - I'm off now to go read the fine article.
To run a C++ (native) app on Android hardware (because that hardware is cheap to buy) supported by only closed drivers:
- Using Android's SurfaceFlinger API means your apps use Dalvik, fail.
- SurfaceFlinger is a bit basic to extend.
- X11 isn't getting ported, Difficult?
- Wayland shows more promise, (and sends fewer network packets with FreeRDP than X forwarding).
- Ubuntu Mir is trying something similar.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Seriously, you had an ex girlfriend named... Wayland? Did "she" have stubble too?
Google for "Susan Wayland" sometime, when you're not at work. When you're done wanking, come back and tell me about that 'stubble' she has.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Sadly, as an asexual I don't wank off to anything..
My first reaction? "Wow, she could take an eye out with those." Followed by "actually, it looks like she has a butt on her chest."
Overall, she does pull off the skin tight latex fettish look quite nicely though.
Still, in regards to "Wayland", the other names are all first names, while in this case, it's a last name. As a first name "Wayland" is usually used for males. Hence the reference.
(Also, unlikely that anyone here that isn't really a CEO posting as AC could claim Ms. Wayland as an "ex girlfriend" anyway. ;) )
So, in my mind, I saw this:
Wayland (aka, "lola" from the song), with bleach blondes "Jolla" and "Sailfish" doing their original "dance stage sensation" on the stripper pole with dollar bills whirling around, as Wayland does his female impersonator gig as Whitney Houston, and the other two undulate provocatively on the two brass stripper poles on stage, doing backup vocals.
I have a overactive imagination, and it wasn't a particularly attractive mental image.
The latex queen is much better though, thank you.
X11 couldn't possibly run this GUI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-lVkBCUrAY
X11 does not support touch. X11 does not support theme based icon recoloring.
X11 does not support 1/4 sizing screens
etc..
Using Android's SurfaceFlinger API means your apps use Dalvik [...] X11 isn't getting ported
Unless your X11 server uses Dalvik. This exists.
You had a girlfriend called Sailfish?
Ummm... OK.
You misunderstand,
I said "sadly", because wanking off is what is considered to be normal, thus my lack of impulse to do so is intrinsically "abnormal".
It isn't that I hold regret about this, merely that being of a sexuality type that is often considered to be abnormal has certain undesirable social consequences, which is what I find sad.
I simply have no sexual reaction to such imagery. This can lead to akward social situations. That is what is meant by "sadly."
X11 supports touch, as does Wayland of course.
The amazing GUI you saw in that video is built on Qt, and can be run on any platform supported by it with some minimal effort.
"theme based icon recoloring" is implemented in the GUI toolkits.
"1/4 sizing screens" is a job for the compositor, in either system.
The biggest user-visible difference between Wayland and X11 will be tear-free display in all circumstances, provided the application's developer has half a clue.
The biggest differences for developers will be the sane (for today's requirements) architecture and vastly simplified API (a big deal in itself).
(Groucho marx voice)
"Ain't nuttin wrong with that tuna, I'l say!"
[Too easy. Sorry.]
It's linux only due to some design choices that rely on other things that are only found in linux. I think the idea was that by not having the portability, configurability or extendibility of X they could get things done more quickly.
I thought SVGAlib was cool too so best of luck to the Wayland people - but there's not much point comparing it to X just now, especially since they don't have much to demonstrate actually running yet.
I haven't looked at the first link (it's a bit rude for people to make points with videos which could be a link to something NSFW for all I know), but your second point is worthless since it's not bare X11 but window managers, which have been doing such things since before slashdot existed (E16). The third point could be done with the window manager as well (once again E16 desktop snapshots in the pager were doing that before this site existed).
I do hope that community distributions will pop up leveraging the work of CyanogenMod/AOSP but rather than Android on top of the custom kernel, Sailfish. I for one would love to flash my "old" Android phone (SGS+) to Sailfish (Currently on CM10). Doing that move would perhaps also break the catch 22 of users-vs-products, since (some) nerds will be happy to switch their phones from Android to "MeeGo++". The Qt on Wayland demos look sweet.... so it seems nice :)
BTW: Why is Sailfish going to run on glibc? For embedded OSes I thought uClibc or musl would be a better fit.
From the authers blog
Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.
That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.
http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html
Canonical being Canonical
The guy has a point. Unless I already know everything about what's written here (and I probably already read the news elsewhere) I wouldn't be triggered to read the full article. It just doesn't appeal to me at all since none of the words used trigger my curiousness. By putting in just a bit more information in the summary, or even just the title, the editor/submitter would have gotten many more people interested. This is bad editing slashdots' part.
How about "Intermediate driver for X ported to Android hardware. Accellerated X now possible on all Android phones" as a headline? Then something like "The makers of Sailfish, an alternative phone OS that is spun off from Nokia's Meego, has ported Wayland to the Android graphics drivers. This means that any linux distribution that wants to run on android hardware only has to include a driver for Wayland graphics, not for every phone or tablet they want to support" for the summary? That way, people that just want a snippet will actually get the message without having to go through google or clicking the link (TL;DR never gonna happen) and people that didn't already read but are interested, will have an idea what sort of link they are going to click on. Probably over 99% of slashdot readers aren't going to click on a link, of for that matter visit a website, that promises them the content is going to be something they'll never understand and could just as well be in a foreign language they don't master. Summaries like this are just that, a good reason why people don't come here anymore.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Phoronix article is quite low on information, and even the original post at http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html assumes some technical knowledge of graphics stack. The basic idea is actually pretty simple. I'll try to break it down.
GPU drivers form a combination of EGL and GLESv2 libraries, each GPU vendor providing their own
This is where libhybris comes into play. The GPU driver libraries don't work without Bionic libc - so libhybris, while running on top of regular linux (and thus [e]glibc), keeps a private Bionic libc open for the GPU drivers' use, and redirects all the EGL/GLESv2 calls to the GPU driver libraries. These libraries run in their own Bionic universe, and tell the actual display hardware what to do.
The new part about Wayland support is just a logical extension of the same behaviour. Wayland already depends on EGL for buffer management, so "all" it really needs is a native display handler. Now as it happens, the native Android display structure can be mapped to the Wayland-EGL display structure. It's not trivial, but it's certainly doable. Thanks to libhybris, the Wayland libraries see a correct native display type and operate on that, while the Android GPU libraries see their respective native display type and thus can drive the hardware as ever before. After all, it's still the SAME hardware regardless of what operating system we may be running. Registers are registers and memory is still memory. From the GPU drivers' point of view nothing has changed.
So what has happened? In addition to just redirecting graphics stack calls to Android drivers, we are now also translating the display subsystem between two somewhat different systems.
If all of the above sounds eerily familiar, you are correct. In networking this kind of design is called a proxy, or if we're talking about link layer, it would be a multi-protocol label switch. Logically there's not much difference.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
X11 couldn't possibly run this GUI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-lVkBCUrAY
Of course it can. Have you never seen a Nokia N9?
X11 does not support touch.
Huh? Now you're claiming that neither the N9 nor event the N900 exists.
X11 does not support 1/4 sizing screens
etc.
Once again - never seen a Nokia Maemo or Meego phone?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Of course it can. Have you never seen a Nokia N9?
Yes I have and the N9 didn't use X11. It used the Qt framebuffer driver.
I think the graphics were handled by the Qt framebuffer driver. Obviously it could run X11, the way you can on an Mac, but that's different than saying X11 was the primary display system.
Of course it can. Have you never seen a Nokia N9?
Yes I have and the N9 didn't use X11. It used the Qt framebuffer driver.
Ok, my bad. Didn't realise the rot had set in so soon :)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
On Meego (specifically the N9 ) the whole enviroment uses X11, not as an option, but as the primary display server.
Do you have a link for that?
While the last two clearly sound like stripper/porno names, like "candi", .....
Wait what? Sailfish is now a stripper/porno name? I've clearly been out of the loop for too long. Out of interest does she work with Marlin?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
From my Nokia N9:
/usr/bin/Xorg -logfile /tmp/Xorg.0.log -core -background none -logverbose 1 -verbose -1 -nocursor -noreset -novtswitch -s 0 -sigstop
~ $ ps -A | grep Xorg
553 root 244:41
17005 user 0:00 grep Xorg
~ $ dpkg -l | grep xserver-xorg
ii xserver-xorg-core 2:1.9.5-meego2121+0m8 Xorg X server - core server
ii xserver-xorg-input-evdev 1:2.6.0-1-meego1042+0m6 X.Org X server -- evdev input driver
ii xserver-xorg-input-mtev 0.1.14+0m6 Multitouch XI2 input driver
ii xserver-xorg-video-fbdev 1:0.4.0-264+0m8 X.Org X server -- fbdev display driver
You see the xserver-xorg-video-fbdev. That's the X11 framebuffer device. Typically it used to emulate X11 onto a device that doesn't support it. This is how for example X11 works on Aqua.
I'm not an expert on X11 and this is going to go over my head rather quickly but I think your listing is proving the opposite of what you think it is proving.
and
Yes, that's what I thought, but I don't have my N9 any more and jbolden (176878) sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Exactly you are running X11 against a framebuffer. Which means X11 is writing to memory and someone else is handling putting that on the screen.