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Intel, Red Hat Working On Enabling Wayland Support In GNOME 168

sfcrazy writes "After shooting down Canonical's Mir, Intel and Red Hat teams have increased collaboration on the development of Wayland. Developers at Intel and Red Hat are working together to 'merge and stabilize the patches to enable Wayland support in GNOME,' as Christian Schaller writes on his blog. The teams are also looking into improving the stack further. Weston won't be used anymore, so GNOME Shell will become the Wayland compositor. It must be noted that Canonical earlier committed to supporting and embracing Wayland. Despite that promise, the company silently stopped contribution, and it was later learned that they were secretly working on their own display server, Mir. Intel's management recently rejected patches for Mir, leaving its maintainance to Canonical. Before Intel's rejection, GNOME and KDE also refused to adopt Mir. Intel's message is clear to Canonical: if you promise to contribute, then do so."
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Intel, Red Hat Working On Enabling Wayland Support In GNOME

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  • by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @02:34PM (#44811465) Homepage

    It's exactly what the Linux desktop needed! Thanks, everyone!

    • by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @02:43PM (#44811613) Homepage Journal
      Petty bickering is more of Ubuntu going, "Wayland isn't coming fast enough... let's create our own instead of helping!" Waste of resources, Ubuntu.
      • by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @02:55PM (#44811801) Homepage

        To be fair, Wayland really was not coming fast enough. I follow the Wayland developer mailing list, and it is apparent Mir seems to have kicked the Wayland developers in the butt and gotten them back to work. And they did fix some mistakes, in particular they realized that the server has to do event handling so that input methods work, rather than the previous idea that clients would have to interpret raw device events. I think they also fixed the other complaint Mir had which was the method to allocate window image buffers could not work with Android drivers, though this area is very confusing and it is not clear if it was a problem and/or whether it is fixed now.

      • by div_2n ( 525075 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @02:58PM (#44811847)

        It's more like Canonical looking at the progress and direction of Wayland and saying, "we don't feel this product is going to be sufficient for our near term mobile goals and would rather roll our own to ensure product delivery"

        Whether or not they were correct in this thinking is possibly open for debate. There's certainly been some things they've said publicly that were debunked, but that doesn't mean the core of their premise is wrong. They are moving to a mobile strategy that AFAIK just isn't a prime directive of Wayland, but I'm not well versed in all that is Wayland so maybe someone that is can clear that up.

        The petty bickering is Wayland devs and fans getting butt hurt about some things Canonical has said publicly some of which has been proven wrong as I said above. Since then, it's been a cacophony of rants from the Wayland devs/fans with general Canonical/Ubuntu haters thrown in bashing on Canonical/Ubuntu/Mir/Unity at every opportunity.

        I've just started tuning it out waiting to see how it all turns out. If there's room for more than one IDE, I don't see why there can't be room for more than one compositor. May the best product win where "win" is defined as the most market share.

        • They are moving to a mobile strategy that AFAIK just isn't a prime directive of Wayland

          There is nothing that qualifies Mir and disqualifies Wayland for mobile. Hell you can use Xorg in mobile and achieve good results, albeit with unnecessary X11-imposed overhead.

          If there's room for more than one IDE, I don't see why there can't be room for more than one compositor.

          Compositors are mutually exclusive. You can run any number of IDEs at the same time, compositors are one-at-a-time things.

          May the best product wi

          • by div_2n ( 525075 )

            There is nothing that qualifies Mir and disqualifies Wayland for mobile. Hell you can use Xorg in mobile and achieve good results, albeit with unnecessary X11-imposed overhead.

            "Not being a prime directive" and "not being able to do it" aren't the same things. If you're trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a mobile device, which Canonical does want to do in order to support convergence, then you WANT your compositor to be designed from the ground up with mobile in mind. It may well be that even given this Wayland is the better choice due to better design. Time will tell.

            Compositors are mutually exclusive. You can run any number of IDEs at the same time, compositors are one-at-a-time things.

            BFD

            The last thing I want to see is someone (who is notorious for being insular) leveraging market share to push their internally controlled solution on everyone else.

            If other distros offer a better product with the help of Wayland, then they'll have no problem

            • unnecessary X11-imposed overhead.

              What overhead? The overhead that made people complain that it made a 20MHz Sun 3/60 run slow? My phone could probably emulate that machine 20x faster than real time if anyone gave a fuck about such a machine anymore.

              Seriously, X11 might have been bloated in 1987, but it sure as hell isn't bloated any more as evidenced by the leading benchmark scores, for example.

              • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2013 @03:47AM (#44817119)
                X is simultaneously bloated and full of arcane and obsolete junk that nobody uses any more. X hands most of its stuff off to extensions increasing context switching latency. Most apps are passing around massive pixmaps or complex rendering instructions meaning any supposed advantage X used to have from primitive lists has largely disappeared.

                It's obviously a bottleneck and this is why Linux devs (including many noted X developers) are keen to get rid of it.

                I'm sure it will take Wayland a while to find its feet and for dists to transition fully but when it does Linux will be better for it. Doesn't stop people running X either - it'll just be over Wayland and probably not noticeably different either.

              • What overhead? The overhead that made people complain that it made a 20MHz Sun 3/60 run slow? My phone could probably emulate that machine 20x faster than real time if anyone gave a fuck about such a machine anymore.

                Ahh yes the old theory that nothing in Linux has gotten slower or more bloated in the last 20 years.

                Here's a test for you, compile a fully working kernel with no modules allowing the use of all the hardware in your machine, without any compression, and then fit that kernel image on the space of a floppy disk. What? Can't do it? That's how I ran my 486 DX4-100 so why can't we do it now?

                We have asked a lot more out of our desktop environments now than we used to. X ran well on your 20MHz machine? On my 700MHz

        • What I'm interested to know is why are they making such a big song and dance about intel not carrying their patches? They can carry their own out of tree patches (just like anybody who wants their own modifications to the driver) and the fact that intel has released their driver as open source is what allows them to do this at all. So the question is how are they adding this support for nVidia or the closed-source AMD drivers?
          • by div_2n ( 525075 )

            Well, it's probably because of something like this which makes it look like Red Hat possibly trying to influence a partner to put a competitor at a disadvantage:

            http://www.muktware.com/5872/intel-red-hat-working-enabling-wayland-support-gnome [muktware.com]

            • Well, it's probably because of something like this which makes it look like Red Hat possibly trying to influence a partner to put a competitor at a disadvantage:

              http://www.muktware.com/5872/intel-red-hat-working-enabling-wayland-support-gnome [muktware.com]

              It seems more like Intel don't want to maintain Mir and would rather just maintain Wayland, which makes sense from their perspective, you can't expect them to maintain support for every display server and the fact that their drivers are open source means the display server author can maintain their own patches for the driver putting the onus on them instead.

              I still don't understand how they intend it to work with AMD and nVidia, are those companies offering to maintain Mir support in their drivers?

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot&worf,net> on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @05:24PM (#44813815)

        Petty bickering is more of Ubuntu going, "Wayland isn't coming fast enough... let's create our own instead of helping!" Waste of resources, Ubuntu.

        How is this any different from the rest of Linux? Oh, KDE is blah, let's create GNOME! or "I hate distribution YYY, lets make ZZZ!"

        How is Wayland vs. Mir any different? "Oh Wayland isn't coming along, let's create Mir!". I thought variety within Linux was a good thing which is why we have a million Linux distributions and forks and other stuff.

        Whether or not they were correct in this thinking is possibly open for debate. There's certainly been some things they've said publicly that were debunked, but that doesn't mean the core of their premise is wrong. They are moving to a mobile strategy that AFAIK just isn't a prime directive of Wayland, but I'm not well versed in all that is Wayland so maybe someone that is can clear that up.

        The petty bickering is Wayland devs and fans getting butt hurt about some things Canonical has said publicly some of which has been proven wrong as I said above. Since then, it's been a cacophony of rants from the Wayland devs/fans with general Canonical/Ubuntu haters thrown in bashing on Canonical/Ubuntu/Mir/Unity at every opportunity.

        How is this any different from the other flamewars that happen? KDE vs. GNOME, vi vs. Emacs, Linux distro vs. Linux distro.

        • Mostly visibility and impact, in this case. The change to Wayland vs. Xorg will be largely a non-issue for most people--except programmers. Of course the Wayland vs Mir thing means the change is to one or the other API (or a compatibility layer...), and determines what graphics display is in the way. In the end it probably won't make a difference. KDE vs. Gnome is right there in your face, all the time.

          More to the point, this is less "I want $THING" and more "I want to write my own because this one d

        • vi is a *beepity beep beep* text editor.

          Emacs is my favorite operating system.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Yes, exactly what Linux needs. And may the best solution win out.

    • by turgid ( 580780 )
      How are things with you guys now that Steve has announced his retirement?
    • Yes, by all means, let's dictate what people should be doing instead of letting them decide for themselves what the best solution should be through trial and error!
  • KDE's support is also in the works but further down the line. I think later 2014 or early 2015? Can't find the schedule at the moment. Enlightenment 18 has partial wayland support with full support expected in 19.

    FINALLY we're going to be free of X. Of course, I still suspect it will take some time to iron out the wrinkles to the point where the experiences on wayland for the various DE's are relatively bug free and are as smooth as butter.
    • by dbIII ( 701233 )
      The widget set works so now it's time for Wayland to catch up and be able to do something actually useful with it. We are a long way from having something like the e18 desktop on X working as an e18 desktop on Wayland.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Canonical seem to be steadily trying to create a single 'us only' distro. Good that others are seeing through this.

    • Huh, what's "US only about Ubuntu?

      • Re:The real agenda? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @02:47PM (#44811679) Homepage Journal
        He means a total NIH mentality. Ubuntu won't use systemd because they wrote Upstart, which is functionally inferior to systemd. Ubuntu ships with Unity, which they wrote, and is functionally inferior to Gnome-Shell. Ubuntu decided Wayland is not here right now and for some reason they absolutely must move off X11 now, so rather than supplying code to Wayland they've decided to write Mir from scratch. Ubuntu uses Canonical-developed Bzr, not Git, with their own Launchpad management system developed in-house.
        • Re:The real agenda? (Score:5, Informative)

          by dominux ( 731134 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @02:59PM (#44811853) Homepage
          lets see . . .
          • Upstart was written before systemd started.
          • Unity was released before gnome-shell was released.
          • Mir is being released before Wayland.
          • Bzr was written before Git started.
          • Launchpad was written before Github (and is open source).

          Canonical bashing might be all the rage at the moment, but I can see how they are feeling a bit hard done by with all these accusations that they should have used subsequent products instead of the ones they wrote first.

          • Re:The real agenda? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @03:15PM (#44812071)

            Actually it's telling, mostly about Canonical's outward attitude. They created all of these solutions, but none of them were widely adopted. Few people use Launchpad, bzr, Upstart, etc. Perhaps it's related to Canonical's seeming desire to develop internally and release when they see fit, rather than develop in the open and take community input?

            And Wayland is out there. It was already being tested on devices when Mir was announced. Of course, no one knew Mir was coming because Canonical likes to work behind closed doors, the larger Linux world be damned.

            • by Kjella ( 173770 )

              Actually it's telling, mostly about Canonical's outward attitude. They created all of these solutions, but none of them were widely adopted. Few people use Launchpad, bzr, Upstart, etc. Perhaps it's related to Canonical's seeming desire to develop internally and release when they see fit, rather than develop in the open and take community input?

              So does a mildly successful OSS project called Android, I don't know maybe Canonical is tired of trying to get everyone on board and just decided "We'll go our own way and when you finally figure out it was the right one feel free to catch up". Android did the first true fork of the Linux kernel that I've heard of and probably ruffled some feathers there but they got it out the door, shipping and working. At the current rate I'd wager a desktopified Android will take over before Gnome/KDE/Unity.

              • So does a mildly successful OSS project called Android

                That Android is OSS is almost completely immaterial because even if it wasn't, the handset vendors would get the sources regardless.

                maybe Canonical is tired of trying to get everyone on board and just decided "We'll go our own way and when you finally figure out it was the right one feel free to catch up".

                And maybe they just think they know better than everyone else. But I suspect that Mir would not have happened if not for Wayland.

                Android did the first

            • by g8oz ( 144003 )

              Exactly. Canonical is free to go its own way, but no one should be surprised if other don't join it.

              I've got a new tagline for them.
              NIH: Not just for closed source.

          • Is that like the equivalent of yelling "first post"? Just because it happened before something else doesn't mean continuing to be the only one using it is the right thing. If they had issues with the programs that followed why didn't they devote time to fixing them and helping make them better and standardized across Linux?

            The entire community benefits from working on the same base. Every time Ubuntu does their NIH game and develops yet another thing that is almost identical to the community standard they a

          • Re:The real agenda? (Score:5, Informative)

            by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @03:26PM (#44812245) Homepage Journal

            Upstart was written before systemd started; Fedora and RHEL used Upstart for a while. Newer, better has come along.

            Unity was a quick response to Gnome Shell, which was available as a functional pre-release in 2009 3 months before Unity. Gnome Shell was up-and-coming and Canonical headed it off. The big move to Unity was highly politicized as "Oh no! Gnome is changing! People hate that! They will be angry at the new Gnome interface! ... Unity!!!!" It was integrated into the distribution as the primary desktop environment one release prior to integration of Gnome Shell, when Gnome Shell was already released and stable.

            Mir came about well into the Wayland development cycle, citing "Wayland is coming too slowly. And we don't like it."

            Bzr is the third generation of a number of unrelated pieces of software. The original Bzr, now renamed Bazaar, was a slow bloated piece of shit that didn't work right at all. The current Bzr started pretty bad, and has been improved; it was easily surpassed by Git at one point, but had caught up. There was also Mercurial and darcs, but that's not really of much import. The reason Bzr isn't more popular isn't that it's not great; it's that Git was better way before Bzr was usable.

            Launchpad took forever to become open source, but that's not really a huge issue. It's sensible, but it is on their laundry list of stuff they've written that's not the same as everything that was already out there. To be fair, all other stuff out there sucks; I'd like to have Launchpad with Git integration (it'll import a Git repo by converting it to Bzr, rather than actually integrating with Git), or something like Gitlab but in Python instead of Ruby (running Ruby apps is really fucking hard; it's like the old days of wild wild Java west when nothing worked unless you were a Dark Invoker, and even then only one app per server... look up RVM and such to get an idea).

          • i would agree but first isn't best or right look how slow and buggy unit was and well to be honest in some places still is and its total lack of features that did not come until later. and this whole we need a mobile os is a huge wast of time a resources these should be sepret projects not shoved down the desktop users throats.
          • Re:The real agenda? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by chuckinator ( 2409512 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @03:40PM (#44812485)

            I have a vastly different criticism from what I typically hear about Canonical and Ubuntu. Circa Ubuntu 12.04, I started noticing severely degrading quality in the underlying platform scripts, default configurations, and over platform management in Ubuntu. Command line sysadmin conventions typically left alone by the sprawling masses of "gotta change for change's sake" developers suddenly came under fire. What was once a very stable system under the hood was suddenly forgotten and uncared for, so I left. I didn't care about Unity because I've been using Fluxbox for nearly 8-9 years prior, but I did care that it was suddenly ridiculously difficult to bring up a stable NFSv4 w/ krb5 auth, that they were by default using linux software raid partition versions that weren't compatible with CentOS, and that iptables wasn't integrated into the baseline OS in a very sane way. I found out that the default build configuration of ntp didn't support autokey. I found out that the default build configuration for OpenSSL and other crypto related packages had no support for FIPS 140-2.

            In other words, with the release of 12.04, ubuntu told me that they suddenly didn't care about enterprise users any more, so I moved on to what I have found to be a superior option for my needs. I understand that I could have rolled my own packages from scratch, but I didn't feel that was an efficient use of my time since switching to Fedora or RHEL/CentOS/SL gave me what I needed by default. I had already cast away the bottomless time sink that was managing gentoo machines, and I wasn't interested in dealing with another only a year later with Ubuntu.

          • Github and Launchpad aren't really comparable.

          • by washort ( 6555 )
            Yes. This is the inverse of NIH -- the "Invented Here" syndrome. I'm particularly frustrated by this because I very much prefer bzr to git, but the hype and community coalesced around git instead.
          • Upstart was written before systemd started.

            So? Does that make it functionally superior? systemd uses dbus, that gives is a good start on being moved from "toy" status to "let's look at this" status.

          • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

            but I can see how they are feeling a bit hard done by with all these accusations that they should have used subsequent products instead of the ones they wrote first.

            The question one must ask at this point is why has Canonical's work on all these products not been widely accepted? They do all this work, create lots of stuff, and the rest of the world routes around it.

            Are we all participants in some global anti-Canonical conspiracy? Are Linus and Kristian Høgsberg and Redhat and Gnome and github.com and the Mint guys and everyone else meeting every second Tuesday to plot the demise of Canonical?

            Obviously not. What I believe we have here is an insular and unapproa

          • Unity, first commit:

            Committer: Neil Jagdish Patel
            Date: 2009-10-15 10:40:35 UTC
            Revision ID: neil.patel@canonical.com-20091015104035-ijthyaoq3rwqu8r7
            [build] Initial commit

            Gnome-shell, first commit:

            tag name 2.27.0 (37b3bb8ab0012a3ba39e775d78772c652eacf804)
            tag date 2009-08-10 22:37:47 (GMT)
            tagged by Owen W. Taylor

            And early development was done in SVN rather than git, so the true start date is much earlier. The first mock-ups appeared in April of that year:

            https://wiki.gnome.org/action/ [gnome.org]

  • I can't help but see this as an ARMsrace, and I think it's a mistake for Intel.

    Like or hate Ubuntu they recognize the consumer trend moving to low power SBCs. ARM is already dominating in this market and, according to wiki [wikipedia.org]:

    these parts [of mir] include Android’s input stack and Google’s Protocol Buffers. An implementation detail in memory management shared with Android is the use of server-allocated buffers which Canonical employee Christopher Halse Rogers claims to be a requirement for “the ARM world and Android graphics stack”.

    So to me, it seems like the push towards Mir for Ubuntu is compatible with their vision of handheld, low power, devices completely replacing the desktop [ubuntu.com]. This may well be the future of personal computing, and if I was Intel I'd want a seat at that table.

  • I use KDE. Period.

    If KDE doesn't work with Mir, and Ubuntu forces Mir with the 13.10 update, then I won't be updating to 13.10 from 13.04.

    I may well have to do a reinstall with LTS, from what I'm reading. And that would piss me off to no end.

    • by msobkow ( 48369 )

      Actually, if I have to reinstall, I think I'll go with a base install of Debian and say "Screw you, Ubuntu!"

    • by gagol ( 583737 )
      Kubuntu will support Wayland, Xubuntu plan to keep xorg for the short term. Even buntu derivative wont support mir... Ubuntu: like Android without dalvik.
      • by msobkow ( 48369 )

        That same article you referenced says XMir provides compatability for KDE and that it's already been tested, so maybe I have less to worry about than I thought.

  • On X, you can have a Gnome application running on KDE and vice versa, will this also be the case when the desktops will use Wayland?
    Or do you have to use XWayland to ensure that this interoperability still works?

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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