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Wayland 1.1 Released — Now With Raspberry Pi Support
An anonymous reader writes "Six months after the release of Wayland 1.0, versions 1.1 of Wayland and Weston have been released. Wayland/Weston 1.1 brings new back-end support for the Raspberry Pi, Pixman renderer, Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and FBDEV frame-buffer device. Wayland/Weston 1.1 also introduces a modules SDK, supports the EGL buffer-age extension, touch-screen calibration support, and numerous optimizations and bug-fixes."
Can anyone point me to the docs for writing my own window manager?
I don't get all the hate Wayland gets. The developers of X don't even like X. If you want to take over X, go ahead, but the majority of people don't want to use X because of its performance limitations.
People who use X for features that Wayland does not support are the minority. A very vocal minority. This minority wants to impose its will over the majority.
Not only is the minority trying to tell the majority what to do, but the minority isn't even the ones who are doing the work, they're the leeches who benefit from the work of the majority.
I love how the whole GPL has breed a user base that has contempt for the developer base. If you don't like it, fork it and do it yourself. Quite your b@#ching
It's not reinventing the wheel so much as reorganizing it to remove legacy cruft from the performance-critical hotpath b/t clients and hardware.
From the Wayland architecture overview:
Most of the complexity that the X server used to handle is now available in the kernel or self contained libraries (KMS, evdev, mesa, fontconfig, freetype, cairo, Qt, etc). In general, the X server is now just a middle man that introduces an extra step between applications and the compositor and an extra step between the compositor and the hardware.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
In the discussions I've seen, there are Wayland fanbois and there are Wayland developers, and there's a big difference between the two camps.
The Wayland fanbois disparage network transparency and consider those who need it to be dinosaurs.
The Wayland developers, on the other hand, seem to overlap considerably with X11 developers, and well understand the need for network transparency. Apparently they're too busy working to be very vocal, so most impressions of Wayland are being put out there by the fanbois.
My impression is that a large part of X11 is really deprecated, left there because it's legacy, might be used, and can't go away. Another way of looking at Wayland is to first strip X11 down to the "real and recent use model," (ie qt/gtk toolkits, etc) look at what you've got left and make some optimizations, strip the obviously defunct parts out of the protocol, make some more optimizations, etc. X11 today isn't even really what X11 was a decade or more ago, it just has backward support for the old X11.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I expect differences:
- The GL part is the same, the renderer side is not.
- The input subsystem is different.
- Everything's Asynchronous by default
- Daniel Stone testing Chrome startup showed that 497ms was due to just waiting for X responses (rendering & input).
- Fewer context switches. Less message passing (since WM & rendering are 1 process).
- Multiple GPUs for rendering are exposed to user-space
About Drivers:
- With Android drivers supported, Games can run on GPUs they couldn't have before.
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Which software depends on Wayland? I'm curious, because I can't think of any.
A backend-agnostic toolkit such as Qt will be an equal citizen on X11, Wayland, Mir, Win32, OS X, Android, Haiku. It should be possible to run the same binary on the same host selecting X11 or Wayland as a backend by loading the appropriate .so at runtime.
So at what point does such software 'depend' on Wayland?
* When a vendor statically links a binary against Wayland? - complain to the vendor, you're paying for it.
* When a remote machine doesn't include the X11 backend? - complain to the sysadmin
* When the Wayland backend supports extra 'bling' ? add the eye-candy to the X11 backend