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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."
Or, ssh into a development server and run eclipse.
Or ssh into a new oracle host and launch the oracle installer
With Wayland soon we'll have to have full graphical installs on ever server rather than just the minimal xlib to support remote viewing of applications.
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Yes, as of a few weeks ago, support for FreeRDP is included.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Can anyone point me to the docs for writing my own window manager?
I would but I can't forward the display and do it remotely without a full desktop install on every server.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Call me ignorant. but can someone explain why we have more than a post per week either about or mentioning Wayland for the last couple of months? Is it really that interesting for the average /. user to hear about every feature added to Wayland or every project/company whatever that supports or does not support Wayland in some way? Or is it just one of those strange obsessions of the /. editors?
I understand it is an important project, supposed to be the successor to X11 etc so it has more interest to geeks than, say, bitcoins, but is it really that interesting?
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If our anonymous coward had a single clue, he would know that ssh is the preferred way to forward X11 SECURELY.
This got hashed out around here two weeks ago.
They seem to be going the RDP route for network apps. I'll have to leave criticism to the experts, but my own experience is that RDP on Windows has much better performance than X via ssh or VNC. And as of MS Server 2008, single apps can be shared (TS Remote Apps) - no longer do you need to share the entire desktop. I have no experience with FreeNX, because the servers I remote into don't have it installed.
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Wayland's native remoting protocol is under development but "only at the proof of concept state". http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~krh/weston/log/?h=remote http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-April/008555.html
All the people talking about RDP keep in mind that that's a stopgap and won't be needed long-term.
Wayland is going to be the best thing to happen Linux ever! This is what's going to make Steam games smooth, make graphical lags and glitches nonexistent, and set the stage for better graphics drivers from graphics card venders! I'm stoked! Can't wait for this to go mainstream!
I haven't tried it with FreeRDP, but Microsoft's version of RDP supports something called "RemoteApp" which lets you run individual programs with network transparency. Some googling turns up what looks to be a FreeRDP version of that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Honestly, why do people hate on products that obviously don't meet there needs?
I understand being upset that something doesn't have what you want, but bashing the creators over and over again just gets old. If it doesn't do what you want, then just don't use it.
Wayland is designed to be much lighter than X11. It does this by offloading as much as possible onto either the kernel or the application. There are pros and cons to doing things this way. Just because you don't think it's worth it, doesn't mean you should be rude to the people who disagree. /End Rant
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
FYI: wayland can use android drivers http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/04/11/2147208/jolla-ports-wayland-to-android-gpu-drivers
Even years from now there will still be a few people who do actual work, and they won't be using tablets to do it. They'll be using computers and they'll need an OS which is optimized for productivity, not gaming, watching movies, tweeting, or shopping at Amazon. Few as they are, these people are willing to pay real money for a computer, like $2,000. Perhaps that is what GNOME and KDE should focus on, considering that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Canonical don't care.
Honestly, why do people hate on products that obviously don't meet there needs?
I understand being upset that something doesn't have what you want, but bashing the creators over and over again just gets old. If it doesn't do what you want, then just don't use it.
That's a great option, up until the point that it becomes a de facto standard. X11 is the de facto standard for graphics on Linux, and Wayland aims to replace it. We're all going to be stuck with Wayland, so we need to speak up and make sure the authors know what we need. I doubt RDP would have been included at all if we didn't bitch about the lack of X forwarding every time Wayland was mentioned.
There are pros and cons to doing things this way
I've yet to see any pros from switching to Wayland. Name one.
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Wayland promises to eliminate tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker, which would be a welcome change.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Wayland is being made for a set of use cases that don't perfectly match those of X11.
If said use cases are important to you, you're free to make your own replacement or keep using X11, or pay someone else to do so for you. Accusing people of being Apple fanboys in completely unrelated stories is unlikely to garner your cause much support, however.
but RDP is a network transparent GUI. How can it be anything else as it shows your GUI over the network.
X haters hate X because its just not as good as people think it is, especially over a slow link. It does everything X does, but faster and more efficiently. If you want to edit a file remotely, you RDP that app and work with it, or you remote the entire desktop (which is still faster than X remoting just the app) and run the edit program.
Exactly. It's not hating the effort. It's not hating the people. It's not really even hating the project's direction per se - not if it could easily be ignored. It's hating that a good, serviceable system with valuable features (GNOME 2, X11) is likely to be REPLACED by an inferior one (GNOME 3, Wayland) lacking important features. Yes, it's still POSSIBLE with open source to forge your own way, but it's hardly practical to spend your effort fixing bad mainstream decisions when you have THINGS TO DO.
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
Why not just ssh into the machine and run the regular vim from cli? =)
/* No Comment */
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 don't get all the hate Wayland gets.
I don't get all the hate Xorg gets.
The developers of X don't even like X.
The users of X like X just fine.
the majority of people don't want to use X because of its performance limitations.
What performance limitations? I have a beautiful hardware accelerated desktop that responds instantly every time. I can run cross platform 3d games at the same speed on both Windows and X. What does Wayland actually do for me?
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.
Yes, we're the minority who actually use our computers to do complex and important things. If all you do is watch youtube, you don't need network transparency. But a UNIX display system should cater to power users. That's why we use UNIX in the first place.
I love how the whole GPL has breed a user base that has contempt for the developer base.
What has bred contempt for the developers is the developers contempt for their users.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Bitching at Wayland devs has turned "not planned, out of scope" into "working RDP implementation available". It seems to be fairly effective.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Bandwidth and CPU power. It takes a lot more of those to send a compressed image over the wire than it does to send the instructions to build an image.
That would be true if modern applications still used X11 graphics primitives. But they don't. It's not 1985 any more; 8x8 bitmap fonts and non-anti-aliased Bresenham lines don't cut it these days. And those are the kinds of graphics primitives X11 supports. As a result, modern UIs generally use a third-party library such as cairo for everything, then the bitmap result gets sent over the wire when remoting with X11. In other words, it's no better than what you'd get with RDP, and if RDP supports primitives that people will actually use, then the latter will actually be superior.
The question is, how easy is it to use? With X forwarding, it's nothing more than 'ssh -X remotehost', then just run your program.
Geeze Hatta, have some faith. If not in the Wayland developers themselves (who are also X developers and have some cred here, IIRC), then in the developers, distributions, and users of the Linux community writ large that will evaluate, integrate, and extend Wayland if it's advantageous over X or ignore if it's not.
Everyone, including the Wayland developers, understands that network transparency is a necessary, compelling feature. It may undergo a shakeup and it may not be fully baked on day 1, but it will happen.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
The developers of X don't even like X.
The users of X like X just fine.
Isn't it telling that the people developing X think it's the wrong solution for the current state of computing? Heck, even the network transparency (what I most often hear people raving about X) is just a slow way to send around bitmaps, because the rendering is rarely done using the X rendering primitives.
Too many flames in these weekly Wayland discussions and not enough facts (or maybe the facts are downmodded; I've gotten to the point where if I look at a wayland article, I don't read all of the comments).
So, I just spent 5 or 10 minutes skimming the Wayland FAQ and architecture diagram.
For comparison, when running X, you might have an ordinary window manager or you might have a compositing window manager. The Wayland model is that it *is* a compositor that provides both window manager functions and some of the functionality of an X server.
Intentionally misstating things rather badly, it sounds like the reason Wayland doesn't support remote displays is because it also doesn't support local displays! More accurately, wayland supports local displays (of course), but unlike X11 provides no way to render to them. Wayland doesn't do rendering; it apparently "just" knows how to swap video buffers to a display device and coordinate buffers between multiple clients.
I'm thinking that, for example, if you want to write a graphical app, you might target OpenGL or cario and then expect your code to work in both Unix (with X) and on Windows (without X). With Unix/X, I'd expect an opengl library that handed X primitives to the X server. With Wayland, you'd apparently have an opengl library that rendered to a buffer and then handed the buffer off to the Wayland compositor.
So, Wayland isn't doing some of the things we'd expect an X server to do. Wayland is never working with drawing primitives. It seems obvious that you'd never be able to run apps that use the old X toolkit libraries against Wayland without an X server in the picture. And, the FAQ admits this and notes that you'll need an X server in addition to Wayland for the foreseeable future.
However, as others have noted, an obvious question is how efficiently a "native" Wayland app could be displayed remotely. If the app and its libraries are rendering graphics primitives into display buffers, it seems obvious that low level primitive operations are lost by the time wayland gets the buffers, so you now have to be able to efficiently transmit bitmap deltas. Queue arguments re whether drawing primitives are more efficient or bitmaps are more efficient... OTOH, it seems unlikely that apps would include their own rendering code instead of using as library. So, we can hope that the libraries offer both wayland and X backends, I guess.
Not an X server developer nor a Wayland developer. I'm sure I garbled things somewhat, but perhaps someone could clarify the mistakes and help take a portion of the FUD out of the weekly Wayland discussions.
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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Flickering and architectural problems. The first is purely cosmetic, but is impossible to fix without making chances to the core protocol. The second means that an order of magnitude more work is required to add new functionality than what could be done with a more modern design.
Daniel Stone explains the problems with X11 in great details here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
I understand people want their forwarding, but as long as I can get a remote window up on my screen, that's fine for me, and they seem to have this covered with RDP. It'd be great to get SSH integration like X currently has, but not essential.
It's not yet clear that Wayland will ever support displaying less than a full desktop across a network connection, and nothing the developers have said suggests otherwise.
I've seen a demo that forwarded individual windows, and moreover managed to move and duplicate the single window over a couple of displays -- like xmove, but working (xmove never worked well, and is unmaintained now), with bonus features. Wayland will have these things in due course.
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