4 ms·

Thanks, just read up on that as well - too bad :/ On the desktop side: I always assumed x11/xorg derived GUIs were purely software rendered? Has Wayland finall

Thanks, just read up on that as well - too bad :/ On the desktop side: I always assumed x11/xorg derived GUIs were purely software rendered? Has Wayland finally landed? Sorry I'm lagging behind >10 years of Linux on desktop.

nrdvana 5y ago
It's a big ball of wax with more details than I'll ever memorize, but I know for a fact that for the last 20 years or more X11 GLX has had "indirect contexts" where the application feeds the OpenGL requests over the display socket and the server renders them (possibly) hardware-accelerated. "direct rendering" is where the X11 client negotiates with the X server to make a direct connection from the application to /dev/whatever to talk directly to the kernel driver of the graphics card to do rendering that bypasses the X server. The whole thing with Wayland is just a new generation of coders saying "hey all this pile of new apis on top of old apis on top of older apis spanning back 40 years designed for hardware that no longer exists is insane. We need to start over." They aren't wrong, but they also haven't reached feature parity with the old stuff yet, because doing hardware accelerated 3D graphics over a pipe to a remote host was a pretty amazing feat of technology. Edit: to be a little more specific, Silicon Graphics company's whole business was accelerated graphics, and they were in business since 1982, and invented most of X11, or at least its extensions.
zamadatix 5y ago
In regards to acceleration pretty much all major Linux desktop environments have hardware accelerated compositing these days regardless if X11 or Wayland is being used. In regards to Wayland landing or not it has become the default for Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, RHEL, and many others but a lot of apps still rely on the XWayland compatibility layer to run. The Asahi Desktop install option currently defaults to an X11 Plasma session, I assume for simplicity at this stage, but Wayland works fine as well. Even if you try a desktop environment that requires accelerated rendering and has no native software fallback it'll work via a software rasterizer like LLVMpipe until real GPU acceleration arrives.

nrdvana 5y ago

It's a big ball of wax with more details than I'll ever memorize, but I know for a fact that for the last 20 years or more X11 GLX has had "indirect contexts" where the application feeds the OpenGL requests over the display socket and the server renders them (possibly) hardware-accelerated. "direct rendering" is where the X11 client negotiates with the X server to make a direct connection from the application to /dev/whatever to talk directly to the kernel driver of the graphics card to do rendering that bypasses the X server. The whole thing with Wayland is just a new generation of coders saying "hey all this pile of new apis on top of old apis on top of older apis spanning back 40 years designed for hardware that no longer exists is insane. We need to start over." They aren't wrong, but they also haven't reached feature parity with the old stuff yet, because doing hardware accelerated 3D graphics over a pipe to a remote host was a pretty amazing feat of technology. Edit: to be a little more specific, Silicon Graphics company's whole business was accelerated graphics, and they were in business since 1982, and invented most of X11, or at least its extensions.

zamadatix 5y ago

In regards to acceleration pretty much all major Linux desktop environments have hardware accelerated compositing these days regardless if X11 or Wayland is being used. In regards to Wayland landing or not it has become the default for Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, RHEL, and many others but a lot of apps still rely on the XWayland compatibility layer to run. The Asahi Desktop install option currently defaults to an X11 Plasma session, I assume for simplicity at this stage, but Wayland works fine as well. Even if you try a desktop environment that requires accelerated rendering and has no native software fallback it'll work via a software rasterizer like LLVMpipe until real GPU acceleration arrives.