9 ms·

Wayland (X11 replacement) 1.0 Officially Released

176 points by Garbage 14y ago

Zenst 14y ago
From what I know Wayland is only supported by Intel and AMD graphics drivers, has this changed?
- DannyBee 14y ago
  It's experimental on my little omap4460 board, which means it must support powervr as well. (I haven't tried it out yet, but Google searches confirm TI is doing this)
- notatoad 14y ago
  It's supported by all the open source drivers, and AMD's proprietary, IIRC. the only driver that doesn't support it is nvidia's proprietary one.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    nvidia cards are quite common, so one hopes this major limitation can be worked around. Perhaps we should get Torvalds to comment in his inimitable style on the situation.
    - beedogs 14y ago
      That didn't really have much of an effect on them the last time he tried it.
      - rabbidrabbit 14y ago
        I don't know about that. Nvidia announced plans for optimus on linux fairly soon after the talk.
        cookiecaper 14y ago
        Torvalds was not referring to nVidia's video support for Linux when he made that statement; he was referring to their reluctance to cooperate with development efforts on their mobile chips, Tegra. nVidia has been far and away the best provider of first-class video driver support for free POSIX systems. The X11 and Linux display landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. I think that nVidia chose the wise strategy of "wait and see" to pinpoint what stabilizes and have since been working on porting pieces of their proprietary driver. The recent addition of XRandR 1.2+ support probably has more to do with the announcement of Optimus development than anything else, and this work is probably a precursor to a version that supports KMS and the other technologies that will be required for compatibility into the next five years of Linux desktop.
        morsch 14y ago
        I thought there was a fundamental licensing incompatibility preventing proprietary drivers from implementing KMS?
      - rjzzleep 14y ago
        actually since then, nvidia tried to add optimus support to their drivers. they asked for dma-buf access, but got adam coxblocked by the free software fanatics
    - notatoad 14y ago
      Official torvalds comment, as requested: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-torvalds-says-f-k-you-to-nvidia/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-... (The workaround is to use the nouveau driver, which is fairly capable as long as you're not trying to play 3D games)
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - coffeeaddicted 14y ago
        I wish Ubuntu (or other distributions) would give out numbers how many people install the proprietary drivers. So many Linux guys seem to dismiss games and 3D (which is certainly also used for VR, architecture, 3D modeling, simulations - and not just for games), so I'm somewhat curious how much it matters on the Linux desktop. At least personally I know more people using proprietary drivers on Linux than not using them, but I guess that's to be expected for a 3D developer ;-) For me the thought of losing nvidia driver support on Ubuntu is rather scary given the current state of all other 3D drivers (and certainly other Distro's might follow with Wayland). I hope the status of other drivers improves a lot before that switch or 3D on Linux will be set back a lot.
        gizmo686 14y ago
        Now that Steam is supporting Linux (and possibly making a Linux/steam box), I suspect that they will be able to push for improved graphics drivers. In fact, If I remember correctly, while working on optimizing some of their first ports to Linux, they got Nvidia to improve some elements of the drivers. Also, given the number of people using Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, my guess would be that Ubuntu will not switch to Wayland until the compatibility issue is solved.
      - keithpeter 14y ago
        nouveau drops to Unity2d on Ubuntu 12.04 when using a modest pci-e GT520 card, so I shall try a 12.10 live cd and see what cooks. Thanks for the quote/still, I was aware of that one. There might need to be another outburst if we reach a situation where a future distribution can't work properly on hardware with nvidia graphics...
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - dlitz 14y ago
    But... but... nVidia makes the best Linux drivers in the world! Etc.! You just can't innovate using them.
cleverjake 14y ago
>> Wayland 1.0 doesn't mark the point that Wayland is complete and ready to replace the X11 Server as there's still a lot of work left to do but it marks the point at which there is API/protocol stability in terms of all future releases being backwards-compatible with the Wayland 1.0 release.
- kijin 14y ago
  Whoever wrote that abomination of a sentence needs to go back to school and learn English again.
  - werrett 14y ago
    Mind you if they keep up with the kick-arse-- volunteer --coding then they are ok with me.
  - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
    It could use a couple of commas, but it's hardly an abomination.
  - sneak 14y ago
    I conjecture that someone named Kristian Høgsberg (and perhaps his project associates) may not be a native speaker of English. Here on the intertubes, it's easy to condemn someone for poor usage, however, remember that communicating complex ideas in a second (or sometimes third, or fourth) language is not always the easiest thing to do. Not everyone grew up soaking in it. This is not an excuse for poor English - but is certainly a legitimate defense against condescending fucktards such as yourself.
    - elwin 14y ago
      That sentence is from the Phoronix article, not Kristian's announcement, which is quite fluent (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2012-October/005967.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2012-Oct...). Phoronix writing is always like that.
pkmays 14y ago
Wayland isn't going to replace X11, it's going to be an alternative to X11.
- Tuna-Fish 14y ago
  Wayland is going to replace portions of X11 pretty much as fast as it can. Basically, the X11 devs want to drop all the parts of the pipeline that Wayland implements from X11 and move to (usermode) X11 on Wayland.
- stephen_g 14y ago
  It's complicated. Wayland can replace some parts of X11 in Linux distributions, but it relies on some other parts of X11 (like libxkbcommon). I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in I also think that Wayland will replace X11 in the way that most of the X11 developers will move to Wayland. X11 will still be around, and probably still be supported by window managers for quite a while though. 1. Wayland is actually the protocol/API, which window managers/compositors and the applications that run in them will implement. The reference compositor for the Wayland project is called Weston.
  - llgrrl_ 14y ago
    >I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in This comment must have been submitted from an X11 application running in MacOS X. I am having the s
  - edhebert 14y ago
    I'm curious, is the naming related to the two neighboring towns in MA?
    - mercurial 14y ago
      As Høgsberg drove through the tiny village of Wayland, Massachusetts, an idea that had been germinating in his mind crystallized. [1] [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-linux-graphics-stack-from-x-to-wayland/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-li...
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I'm hoping that Wayland will allow for faster direct rendering APIs. There seems to be too much legacy X11 stuff for embedded systems to easily operate in small memory situations.
- krakensden 14y ago
  It requires compositing... so you're probably not going to get any wins in the memory department.
- JulianMorrison 14y ago
  X11 is fine on machines from the 1990s, with less power than a low end smartphone.
  - albertzeyer 14y ago
    Which had a very different architecture than current smartphones or PCs. There was no OpenGL in 1990...
    - npsimons 14y ago
      And yet X11 works just fine (network transparency included) on my N900 with 256MB of RAM . . .
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Well the counter example of that is the Raspberry Pi, it runs X11 poorly while having more capacity and much more performance than the 486 and original Pentium (which are '90's machines). I've been working with a 'Pandaboard' which is an OMAP 4460 system, and its challenged too. So perhaps we have a different definition of 'is fine.' :-) Have you run X11 on an RpI ? did you think that was fine?
    - pmarin 14y ago
      I have never seen a 486 running X11 at 1080p. Now days there are tons of layers of crap on top of X11.
prodigal_erik 14y ago
I find it strange to call it 1.0 while remoting is still on the todo list. The age of vertical scaling, owning one big computer and sitting at its console, is well into decline.
- wtallis 14y ago
  Even with cloud computing, all the rendering and half of the other processing is done client-side. Pushing pixels or low-level drawing commands over the network is not the way technology is heading.
  - ch6530 14y ago
    The current trend in scientific computing is to put GPUs on the server and push pixels to the client, e.g. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/software-switch-to-save-santos-25m/story-e6frgakx-1226057034041 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/software-switc...
    - Sanddancer 14y ago
      For which they're using VNC, not X forwarding. There are a lot of ways to push those pixels that don't involve X.
    - levesque 14y ago
      Oh, it's a trend? How often is scientific computing about pixels anyway? I'm willing to bet not very often. Most of the time the results are a bunch of digits, a few matrices at most - a configuration, a solution to a problem.
  - billwashere 14y ago
    Whilst I don't want this to happen, what about Cloud Gaming? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming)
    - sagarm 14y ago
klrr 14y ago
Omg! Can't wait to try it out, hopefully in a year or so we can completly uninstall X from our systems.
- jeltz 14y ago
  What is so wrong with X? I understand that it is a mess and the developers have to work hard to add new features to it. But as a user of X I virtually have no problems. For the future Wayland might be the correct way forward but I do not see any short term gain for the users.
  - padraigm 14y ago
    Some people complain about bloat and bad compositing performance under X, but my real problem with X is that it's very insecure. Any program running on a given X server can see any keyboard input to any other program running on the same server by default. As it stands, there's not a practical solution to this.
    - ygra 14y ago
      Qubes [1] maybe. But that may be a bit overkill as well. [1] http://qubes-os.org/Home.html http://qubes-os.org/Home.html
      - padraigm 14y ago
        The Qubes project is interesting in some ways, but I think they're trying to do too much in one go, and as a result the final product doesn't seem very practical. For example, applications can't use hardware accelerated video according to their FAQ [1]. So pardon me while I braindump... It would be an interesting project to integrate an Android-style permissions permissions system(possibly using SELinux) complete with per-application virtual filesystems (using FUSE) into the system package manager. So, for example, you install a music player, the package manager sets up a virtual filesystem for it that lets the program see its own configuration directory and your music directory, but nothing else. The package manager asks if you'd like to allow network permissions to the music player (for downloading album art or whatever); if yes, a firewall rule is added specifically allowing that process to access the network, if not, none is. One problem with that kind of system is that a lot of end-user desktop programs are written with the assumption that the entire home directory is fair game. I'm not convinced that's really necessary, though. In case a program occasionally wants to access a file outside of its normal sandbox (say, you just downloaded a podcast into your downloads directory and want to play it with that music player I mentioned previously) you could always have the supervising program ask the user if it's okay to temporarily add that file to the program's sandbox. If it happens in an expected way (e.g. the user clicks on a media file in the file manager) you could safely grant access to the file without explicitly asking the user. Something like that, on a distro using Wayland as the windowing system (to avoid the gaping security holes in X), would provide 90% of the security that Qubes does with significantly less inconvenience to the user. It would still require a good deal of work for the package maintainers, but perhaps a distro like that could implement something like the AUR [2] so users could do a lot of the packaging work for peripheral packages. [1] - http://qubes-os.org/FAQ.html http://qubes-os.org/FAQ.html [2] - https://aur.archlinux.org/ https://aur.archlinux.org/
drhowarddrfine 14y ago
Goodbye X11 forwarding! And Linux pushes itself one more step away from Unix.

176 points by Garbage 14y ago

Zenst 14y ago

From what I know Wayland is only supported by Intel and AMD graphics drivers, has this changed?

DannyBee 14y ago
It's experimental on my little omap4460 board, which means it must support powervr as well. (I haven't tried it out yet, but Google searches confirm TI is doing this)
notatoad 14y ago
It's supported by all the open source drivers, and AMD's proprietary, IIRC. the only driver that doesn't support it is nvidia's proprietary one.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  nvidia cards are quite common, so one hopes this major limitation can be worked around. Perhaps we should get Torvalds to comment in his inimitable style on the situation.
  - beedogs 14y ago
    That didn't really have much of an effect on them the last time he tried it.
    - rabbidrabbit 14y ago
      I don't know about that. Nvidia announced plans for optimus on linux fairly soon after the talk.
      - cookiecaper 14y ago
        Torvalds was not referring to nVidia's video support for Linux when he made that statement; he was referring to their reluctance to cooperate with development efforts on their mobile chips, Tegra. nVidia has been far and away the best provider of first-class video driver support for free POSIX systems. The X11 and Linux display landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. I think that nVidia chose the wise strategy of "wait and see" to pinpoint what stabilizes and have since been working on porting pieces of their proprietary driver. The recent addition of XRandR 1.2+ support probably has more to do with the announcement of Optimus development than anything else, and this work is probably a precursor to a version that supports KMS and the other technologies that will be required for compatibility into the next five years of Linux desktop.
        morsch 14y ago
        I thought there was a fundamental licensing incompatibility preventing proprietary drivers from implementing KMS?
    - rjzzleep 14y ago
      actually since then, nvidia tried to add optimus support to their drivers. they asked for dma-buf access, but got adam coxblocked by the free software fanatics
  - notatoad 14y ago
    Official torvalds comment, as requested: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-torvalds-says-f-k-you-to-nvidia/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-... (The workaround is to use the nouveau driver, which is fairly capable as long as you're not trying to play 3D games)
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - coffeeaddicted 14y ago
      I wish Ubuntu (or other distributions) would give out numbers how many people install the proprietary drivers. So many Linux guys seem to dismiss games and 3D (which is certainly also used for VR, architecture, 3D modeling, simulations - and not just for games), so I'm somewhat curious how much it matters on the Linux desktop. At least personally I know more people using proprietary drivers on Linux than not using them, but I guess that's to be expected for a 3D developer ;-) For me the thought of losing nvidia driver support on Ubuntu is rather scary given the current state of all other 3D drivers (and certainly other Distro's might follow with Wayland). I hope the status of other drivers improves a lot before that switch or 3D on Linux will be set back a lot.
      - gizmo686 14y ago
        Now that Steam is supporting Linux (and possibly making a Linux/steam box), I suspect that they will be able to push for improved graphics drivers. In fact, If I remember correctly, while working on optimizing some of their first ports to Linux, they got Nvidia to improve some elements of the drivers. Also, given the number of people using Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, my guess would be that Ubuntu will not switch to Wayland until the compatibility issue is solved.
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      nouveau drops to Unity2d on Ubuntu 12.04 when using a modest pci-e GT520 card, so I shall try a 12.10 live cd and see what cooks. Thanks for the quote/still, I was aware of that one. There might need to be another outburst if we reach a situation where a future distribution can't work properly on hardware with nvidia graphics...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- dlitz 14y ago
  But... but... nVidia makes the best Linux drivers in the world! Etc.! You just can't innovate using them.

cleverjake 14y ago

>> Wayland 1.0 doesn't mark the point that Wayland is complete and ready to replace the X11 Server as there's still a lot of work left to do but it marks the point at which there is API/protocol stability in terms of all future releases being backwards-compatible with the Wayland 1.0 release.

kijin 14y ago
Whoever wrote that abomination of a sentence needs to go back to school and learn English again.
- werrett 14y ago
  Mind you if they keep up with the kick-arse-- volunteer --coding then they are ok with me.
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  It could use a couple of commas, but it's hardly an abomination.
- sneak 14y ago
  I conjecture that someone named Kristian Høgsberg (and perhaps his project associates) may not be a native speaker of English. Here on the intertubes, it's easy to condemn someone for poor usage, however, remember that communicating complex ideas in a second (or sometimes third, or fourth) language is not always the easiest thing to do. Not everyone grew up soaking in it. This is not an excuse for poor English - but is certainly a legitimate defense against condescending fucktards such as yourself.
  - elwin 14y ago
    That sentence is from the Phoronix article, not Kristian's announcement, which is quite fluent (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2012-October/005967.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2012-Oct...). Phoronix writing is always like that.

pkmays 14y ago

Wayland isn't going to replace X11, it's going to be an alternative to X11.

Tuna-Fish 14y ago
Wayland is going to replace portions of X11 pretty much as fast as it can. Basically, the X11 devs want to drop all the parts of the pipeline that Wayland implements from X11 and move to (usermode) X11 on Wayland.
stephen_g 14y ago
It's complicated. Wayland can replace some parts of X11 in Linux distributions, but it relies on some other parts of X11 (like libxkbcommon). I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in I also think that Wayland will replace X11 in the way that most of the X11 developers will move to Wayland. X11 will still be around, and probably still be supported by window managers for quite a while though. 1. Wayland is actually the protocol/API, which window managers/compositors and the applications that run in them will implement. The reference compositor for the Wayland project is called Weston.
- llgrrl_ 14y ago
  >I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in This comment must have been submitted from an X11 application running in MacOS X. I am having the s
- edhebert 14y ago
  I'm curious, is the naming related to the two neighboring towns in MA?
  - mercurial 14y ago
    As Høgsberg drove through the tiny village of Wayland, Massachusetts, an idea that had been germinating in his mind crystallized. [1] [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-linux-graphics-stack-from-x-to-wayland/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-li...

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I'm hoping that Wayland will allow for faster direct rendering APIs. There seems to be too much legacy X11 stuff for embedded systems to easily operate in small memory situations.

krakensden 14y ago
It requires compositing... so you're probably not going to get any wins in the memory department.
JulianMorrison 14y ago
X11 is fine on machines from the 1990s, with less power than a low end smartphone.
- albertzeyer 14y ago
  Which had a very different architecture than current smartphones or PCs. There was no OpenGL in 1990...
  - npsimons 14y ago
    And yet X11 works just fine (network transparency included) on my N900 with 256MB of RAM . . .
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Well the counter example of that is the Raspberry Pi, it runs X11 poorly while having more capacity and much more performance than the 486 and original Pentium (which are '90's machines). I've been working with a 'Pandaboard' which is an OMAP 4460 system, and its challenged too. So perhaps we have a different definition of 'is fine.' :-) Have you run X11 on an RpI ? did you think that was fine?
  - pmarin 14y ago
    I have never seen a 486 running X11 at 1080p. Now days there are tons of layers of crap on top of X11.

prodigal_erik 14y ago

I find it strange to call it 1.0 while remoting is still on the todo list. The age of vertical scaling, owning one big computer and sitting at its console, is well into decline.

wtallis 14y ago
Even with cloud computing, all the rendering and half of the other processing is done client-side. Pushing pixels or low-level drawing commands over the network is not the way technology is heading.
- ch6530 14y ago
  The current trend in scientific computing is to put GPUs on the server and push pixels to the client, e.g. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/software-switch-to-save-santos-25m/story-e6frgakx-1226057034041 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/software-switc...
  - Sanddancer 14y ago
    For which they're using VNC, not X forwarding. There are a lot of ways to push those pixels that don't involve X.
  - levesque 14y ago
    Oh, it's a trend? How often is scientific computing about pixels anyway? I'm willing to bet not very often. Most of the time the results are a bunch of digits, a few matrices at most - a configuration, a solution to a problem.
- billwashere 14y ago
  Whilst I don't want this to happen, what about Cloud Gaming? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming)
  - sagarm 14y ago

klrr 14y ago

Omg! Can't wait to try it out, hopefully in a year or so we can completly uninstall X from our systems.

jeltz 14y ago
What is so wrong with X? I understand that it is a mess and the developers have to work hard to add new features to it. But as a user of X I virtually have no problems. For the future Wayland might be the correct way forward but I do not see any short term gain for the users.
- padraigm 14y ago
  Some people complain about bloat and bad compositing performance under X, but my real problem with X is that it's very insecure. Any program running on a given X server can see any keyboard input to any other program running on the same server by default. As it stands, there's not a practical solution to this.
  - ygra 14y ago
    Qubes [1] maybe. But that may be a bit overkill as well. [1] http://qubes-os.org/Home.html http://qubes-os.org/Home.html
    - padraigm 14y ago
      The Qubes project is interesting in some ways, but I think they're trying to do too much in one go, and as a result the final product doesn't seem very practical. For example, applications can't use hardware accelerated video according to their FAQ [1]. So pardon me while I braindump... It would be an interesting project to integrate an Android-style permissions permissions system(possibly using SELinux) complete with per-application virtual filesystems (using FUSE) into the system package manager. So, for example, you install a music player, the package manager sets up a virtual filesystem for it that lets the program see its own configuration directory and your music directory, but nothing else. The package manager asks if you'd like to allow network permissions to the music player (for downloading album art or whatever); if yes, a firewall rule is added specifically allowing that process to access the network, if not, none is. One problem with that kind of system is that a lot of end-user desktop programs are written with the assumption that the entire home directory is fair game. I'm not convinced that's really necessary, though. In case a program occasionally wants to access a file outside of its normal sandbox (say, you just downloaded a podcast into your downloads directory and want to play it with that music player I mentioned previously) you could always have the supervising program ask the user if it's okay to temporarily add that file to the program's sandbox. If it happens in an expected way (e.g. the user clicks on a media file in the file manager) you could safely grant access to the file without explicitly asking the user. Something like that, on a distro using Wayland as the windowing system (to avoid the gaping security holes in X), would provide 90% of the security that Qubes does with significantly less inconvenience to the user. It would still require a good deal of work for the package maintainers, but perhaps a distro like that could implement something like the AUR [2] so users could do a lot of the packaging work for peripheral packages. [1] - http://qubes-os.org/FAQ.html http://qubes-os.org/FAQ.html [2] - https://aur.archlinux.org/ https://aur.archlinux.org/

drhowarddrfine 14y ago

Goodbye X11 forwarding! And Linux pushes itself one more step away from Unix.