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A New Era For Linux's Low-level Graphics (collabora.com)
Slashdot reader mfilion writes: Over the past couple of years, Linux's low-level graphics infrastructure has undergone a quiet revolution. Since experimental core support for the atomic modesetting framework landed a couple of years ago, the DRM subsystem in the kernel has seen roughly 300,000 lines of code changed and 300,000 new lines added, when the new AMD driver (~2.5m lines) is excluded. Lately Weston has undergone the same revolution, albeit on a much smaller scale. Here, Daniel Stone, Graphics Lead at Collabora, puts the spotlight on the latest enhancements to Linux's low-level graphics infrastructure, including Atomic modesetting, Weston 4.0, and buffer modifiers.
That's what the kernel is there for. EVERYTHING.
They really need to rename the DRM subsystem.
DRM in this context is "Direct Rendering Manager" not "Digital rights management" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A stupid name if there ever was one.
How about letting me use the Direct Rendering Manager in X without disrupting my console text mode? Leave my text alone!
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Next up we have the New Accelerated Micro Binary Launcher Assembly.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I've tried a lot of distributions over the years and I can't say I've ever found an interface that felt totally 'light' for linux. I'm not a big fan of OS/X but I can say that it is one thing they got right. Windows even feels light by comparison. I hope it is changing for the better.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So are Linux graphics drivers completely open-source?
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
Nvidia Integrated Graphics Generation Extension Refresh
Seriously, why has the Linux graphics subsystems been in a cycle of endless churn for decades now. Everyone says they're making the next X11 killer, even though every time they end up being a half baked half functional pile of poo. So here we are, still using X, only because it works at all.
Bleh.
Nvidia drivers don't support OpenGL under Weston (maybe not under any Wayland implementation?). Without that support, Weston is nearly useless.
Between that and Nvidia's Windows drivers refusing to load inside a virtual machine, I'm not in a hurry to buy any more Nvidia hardware.
How well does Weston work with Intel or AMD graphics?
Most consumer desktop video cards have a both an open source driver and a proprietary driver available for Linux.
Meanwhile, political bullshit drama and meaningless crapticles populate the homepage ...
This site does not deserve the name "Slashdot". The tagline should be "News for 'tards, stuff that saddens."
Framerate-Accelerating General Graphics Operations Technology.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Direct Rendering Manager?
Sounds like a good place to hide some Digital Rights Management.
What the fuck does this all mean? How will the end user (me) see these improvements?
Leave my text alone!
That would require kernel-mode settings.
But very likely you have still a user-mode-setting driver, because you're using Nvidia GPUs.
Stop using Nvidia hardware with their proprietary blob that doesn't play nicely with the rest of the usual Linux stack.
(In a gross over simplification, Nvidia basically recompile their Windows driver for Linux. So if they need something that work differently, or if Linux some things being done differently, well too bad for you. Too bad for you if you have a laptop that goes into suspend or want to switch to a text console virtual terminal)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
DRM was a term a video interface in the Linux kernel before it became a euphemism for consumer abuse in the publishing industry.
Most of the 'tech news sits firmly in that category. Doesn't help that the editors are rosco dipsticks, of course, but "we stuffed 300k more lines of code into the kernel just so we could int 13h" is cutting edge for the X tards. Just like how "we proposed to stuff all our utter crap code to solve problems that aren't" is cutting edge for the poettering crew. This is the best "news" we have, sorry.
Because just about everyone wants killer graphics instead of just good enough?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Microsoft did create some high performance low level graphics stack though, that is hard to catch up to.
super duper graphics system v. 1.0 : Vista (what linux "3D" desktops are trying to catch up to)
v. 1.1 : 7 (added back running multiple graphics cards or GPUs from different vendors)
v. 1.2 : 8
v. 1.3 : 8.1
whatever : 10
This allowed those super smooth $89 phones years ago, or to do things that would require to kill the X server on linux (like recover from a crash or switch driver) which don't even require to log out in Windows.
Too bad they tried to copy Android or iOS by having craplets and daemons running behind your back, and not letting customize your GUI as you could do in XP or even 3.1 (like when they removed the GUI for color schemes in Windows 7)
(I'm also disgusted that video games have become social media and spyware, but that's another issue). So, I ran Windows for 15 years (and DOS), and now have been running linux for 10 years. Bleh, too.
Making an X11 killer is easy. The problem is nobody will install that because it won't work with everyone's X11 stuff, so the developers have to go back and make their X11 killer do everything exactly like X11 does so that it works with decades of legacy software and workflows.
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X works and is great as a windowing system. Leaving the dressup to the client is good and with modern IPC is fast enough. Combine X with a good typesetting system (eg. LaTeX or Postscript) a la NeXT and what eventually evolved into Mac OS X and it is perfect - you can make pixel-perfect documents from screen to print or make any screen copy-pastable without the program requiring you to implement a custom menu or data export routine.
In modern days, I would say a rendering engine (XML/HTML) may be better from a developer perspective (since you're already developing a web browser) but on the other hand, all the ML's are unnecessarily chatty.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I thought this was about Nethack.
yes, we should beseech systemd developer to write Xd
decades of legacy software and workflows.
Legacy, n. Something distinguished from the competition by actually working.
I like remote windowing and I like middle click to paste.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
jwm provides 90% of a desktop environment and is part of what makes Puppy Linux so fast/light, (disclaimer I've made a few contributions to Puppy and jwm)
Switching to Wayland+Weston-alikes won't be much lighter (maybe faster due to GPU acceleration) and since decorations are handled by the apps it looks like a shinier version of the old mismatched motif/tcl-tk/gtk/kde UI days. Many of the problems with X that wayland was developed to solve have been quietly mitigated in the kernel, but not implemented in the Xserver or libraries AFAICT; for example: socket splicing (since Linux-4.2) could be used to speed up large X requests and c99 variable length arrays could be incorporated into X requests so that a single function could handle all requests as a pointer to a struct rather than copying and passing around a huge amount of data using a different function for each request... this should have been part of xcb
If anyone is interested in making the situation better for wayland, check out the Wayland/Weston and Mesa source and this low level linux graphics tutorial: http://betteros.org/tut/graphi...
Or, alternatively, be something worth porting to or developing for. If you want to be an X11 killer, then be something that kills the X11 software library.