9 ms·

The thought process that led Canonical to create Mir

70 points by cs702 14y ago

networked 14y ago
>4) We need server-side buffer allocation for ARM hardware; Could someone explain why?
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Something... something... support Android graphics drivers. Even though the Wayland devs have said that this is possible in Wayland or with some modifications.
- ibotty 14y ago
  something was said about it in irc a few days ago. i am not competent enough to paraphrase the reason. so here is the quote from http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1 http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1 00:15 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: why do you guys want server-allocated buffers? 00:15 <RAOF> Prf_Jakob: Mostly arm damage, there. 00:15 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: so thats whats its really about then? Closed source drivers? 00:16 <RAOF> No - arm hardware (apparently) has insane constraints that make server allocation more attractive. 00:16 <RAOF> eg - you have at most 6 buffers that are framebuffer-compatible. 00:16 <krh> we have those GPUs at intel too 00:17 <krh> weston runs on those (note that daniel stone said: 00:35 <daniels> RAOF: fwiw, i've got a wayland backend for arm hardware which does server-side allocation right now. didn't require one single change to any of the clients, or even compositors. it's all internal to the egl stack. )
  - zanny 14y ago
    I have a bad feeling this G+ post is about to be ripped apart as badly as the initial wiki debacle. I wonder when people will realize, though, that as Canonical tries to justify itself on technical merits and having to backpedal every time, their answer of "we want to control it so we can move it and change it as we want to without having to wait for consensus or forking" is not good, but legitimate.
GhotiFish 14y ago
for the record. this: "ranging from the sensible (we want to write our own display serve so that we can control it)" is sensible to him. What the hell is going on at Canonical? I can't imagine how BADLY mir will damage desktop development in linux if Canonical actually forces its adoption and then holds the main repository. It would have to be forked to get it away from them. Are we even allowed to fork CCA code? Why do I get the feeling that if any of this happens, canonical is going to be suing linux end users. what a mess.
- asb 14y ago
  He means it's a sensible speculation to make, not necessarily that it's a good reason for Canonical to start Mir.
- marcoperaza 14y ago
  Why wouldn't you be able to fork Mir? The open source licenses used explicitly allow that. Disagree with Canonical on strategy if you want, but spreading FUD about lawsuits is misinformed at best, maliciously dishonest at worst.
  - zanny 14y ago
    If you for Mir you can't accomplish anything by doing so because the drivers target the reference implementation. It is why you don't see prolific display servers all about like you do text editors, terminal emulators, or music players. And as Mir changes, and as those changes prompt changes in the drivers that run Mir, and derivative project ends up having to adopt those changes to continue using newer drivers. And unless the developers of a Mir fork also plan on maintaining patches to all the GUI toolkits and compositors to support their fork, they also need to emulate Mir's behavior in relation to the rest of the upwards stack.
    - tmzt 14y ago
      Though if there is a well defined and stable driver ABI compatibility shouldn't really be a problem.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Mark is needlessly caustic in these comments, in my opinion.
- ihsw 14y ago
  The entire exchange reads like disgruntled co-workers doing nothing but accusing and blaming each-other, and Mark's comments may be needlessly volatile however it's not misdirected. It's a shining example of office politics spilling over to the open-source community.
- da_n 14y ago
  I wouldn't say it was needless. As far as I'm concerned, it is the KDE and Wayland guys who have come out screaming in a very public, very vitriolic attack against Ubuntu. No matter what side of the argument you stand on, you can't deny that they have been taking a shit on the Ubuntu brand (although a lot of the worst comments have been deleted it appears). It is no wonder Mark is reacting in a caustic manner in my opinion.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    I sympathize with them. I'm still seeing mistruths about Wayland all over the Internet as a result of that highly inaccurate (at least initially, they've editted it) MirSpec document.
  - tjdetwiler 14y ago
    Personally I have higher standards for professionalism for someone in Mark's position vs the KDE/Wayland guys.
  - burntsushi 14y ago
    > it is the KDE and Wayland guys who have come out screaming in a very public, very vitriolic attack against Ubuntu When blatantly false things are stated about your project by an organization as big as Canonical, one really can't blame them for expressing frustration. Especially when there is FUD about Wayland everywhere you go.
- 14y ago
bjourne 14y ago
It's well known that Canonical likes to do things their way and maybe suffers from a slight NIH syndrome. But do people have to be so upset about it? Maybe Rogers explanation is completely wrong and the real reason is "we thought it would be fun to write a new display server!" Does it matter? Saying "you're increasing desktop fragmentation" is silly and implies that writing Mir is somehow worse than writing no code at all. Graphics on desktop Linux currently kind of sucks. Windows and OS X are years ahead while we are stuck on X11 with flakey, sometimes-working, compiz-quality 3d effects. I think any effort to remedy that situation should be cherised.
- vidarh 14y ago
  I think it boils down to people being upset because Canonical through Ubuntu actually has the power to make Mir a real contender just like that, and it may very well leave Wayland in the dust due to internal discussions in Canonical rather than gaining acceptance by the community first Everything else seems like excuses to me. And while I use Ubuntu, and Mir sounds appealing, especially given my experience with other Ubuntu projects (including Unity, which I love), I don't particularly like this approach either. Though I have no reason to think I won't stick with Ubuntu.
- dscrd 14y ago
  >Saying "you're increasing desktop fragmentation" is silly and implies that writing Mir is somehow worse than writing no code at all. Nope. The logical option to writing Mir is not "no code at all" but contributing code and influence to supporting Wayland.
  - fingerprinter 14y ago
    Why? What if Wayland and Mir have different goals? What if the venn-diagram overlap of those goals is less than ideal for Ubuntu and where it is going? Look at the absolute MESS that compiz, x and other things in Linux have had b/c of the "support all the things" attitude. The simple FACT is that it is much easier to be exceedingly great at a small subset of things than a large super set of things. Mir is specific and exact to what Canonical wants and needs out of Ubuntu. Wayland is a GENERAL solution that, sure, Canonical could influence, but would ultimately need to be more than just what Canonical needs. That means, you guessed it, bugs, rough corners, things that aren't supported. It's called focus. Canonical is focusing on delivering an EXPERIENCE and they decided they could do it better in this approach. I agree with this b/c of 1. history 2. experience and 3. the current state of the various projects. And don't forget that the code is going to be open source. And I don't understand why this is a problem in the linux world when the web world this is typically encouraged as "the best project will win". Do we need Derby, Backbone, Meteor, Tower, Express, Knockout etc etc etc? What about Rails, Sinatra, Camping, Padrino? Django, Flask, Pyramid? Riak,Mongo,Couch? Why can't they all join forces and "contribute code and influence"? In the web world, this is kind of encouraged and seen as good for competition. In the linux world is it seen as "not being a good community member". It's fuckin' bullshit.
yarrel 14y ago
"What can we do next to screw up Linux?"
- freehunter 14y ago
  No one can screw up Linux. It's open source and there's a huge and disparate community behind many projects spanning thousands of use cases. Even if Ubuntu somehow managed to go closed source and charge a mandatory license fee, Linux would still be Linux. Ubuntu is not the only project, by far. And you wonder why Shuttleworth is getting pissed at you guys.
AnIrishDuck 14y ago
> Weston, the reference Wayland compositor, is a test-bed. It's for the development of the Wayland protocol, not for being an actual desktop shell. We could have forked Weston and bent it to our will, but we're on a bit of an automated-testing run at the moment, and it's generally hard to retro-fit tests onto an existing codebase. Weston has some tests, but we want super-awesome-tested code. I'd accept this as reason alone to go with Mir, assuming it's correct. My experience with window managers on linux has been riddled with constant bugs and regressions that are the hallmark of software that isn't adequately tested. And he's absolutely right. If code isn't designed ahead of time to be modular and decoupled (testable), you're going to have a hell of a time refactoring it later to get good test coverage. I'm not asserting Weston is these things. But, accepting what Christopher says here, Canonical might actually be justified in creating Mir. I'd especially be interested in hearing if someone can refute the mentioned point.
- ibotty 14y ago
  kwin will be its own wayland compositor, gnome's mutter will be its own compositor. why didn't canonical create unity as its own wayland compositor? (in other words: criticizing weston is a strawman)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - SEMW 14y ago
    The section the GP quoted was not the entire article. Rogers went on to end the quoted paragraph with the rhetorical question "We don't want Weston, but maybe we want Wayland?", and went on to address that question in the rest of the article. Whether or not you agree with the chain of reasoning, pretending he never wrote anything other than a single step in it, and calling that a "strawman" on the grounds that it isn't a whole chain, is a little silly.
- lmm 14y ago
  He's wrong. Refactoring existing code to make it testable is not easy, but it's a lot easier than rewriting it from scratch, and more effective too.
shmerl 14y ago
I didn't get the answer. Why couldn't they work with Wayland to build the missing pieces? Or Wayland developers had some principal objections? It looks like Canonical didn't even make an attempt to collaborate. That's the main point of criticism. > the upsides of doing our own thing - we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review That's exactly the NIH problem. So in essence - no real reason, except selfish interests. > I'm particularly excited about our engagements with NVIDIA and AMD; although it's early days, I'm hopeful we can get a solution for “but what about proprietary drivers?” not just for Mir, but for everyone. At least this part sounds good. If drivers can be shared - hardware fragmentation will be avoided - (i.e. Wayland will reuse the same drivers especially on mobile).
- adamors 14y ago
  Shuttleworth actually goes on to say in the comments "The very people protesting their super-collaborative credentials have a long history of being super-antagonistic to Ubuntu in practice." I don't think it's even the NIH problem it's just sheer delusion.
freehunter 14y ago
I do wish that Canonical would fix their SSL issue. Here is what I see when I visit from Chrome [1]. This is particularly frustrating because when I click proceed, this is the next thing I see [2]. I surely am not going to make an SSL exception in our corporate proxy just because Canonical can't fix their certificates. [1] http://i.imgur.com/UMST00Q.png http://i.imgur.com/UMST00Q.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/iv4ZCaq.png http://i.imgur.com/iv4ZCaq.png
Osiris 14y ago
I find it interesting in the comments that most people are claiming that Canonical's time would be better spent contributing to existing projects, but isn't the nature of Open Source to be constantly forking, iterating, and contributing new code when you think the existing stuff isn't good enough? Aren't these attitudes the basis of why many subsystems in Linux have been around for decades? Others complain about fragmentation, which is another obtuse argument when you count the number Linux distributions available, the number of open source packages, and the entire nature of GitHub with their "please fork me" button. Open Source is by nature fragmented. If they want to go run off and do their own thing, what's the problem? It's their time and money. If what they write is crap, no other distributions will use it. If it's awesome, it has a lot of potential, but the community should decide after it's released, not before.
- Shish2k 14y ago
  Forking, iterating, and contributing new code are all good things. Reinventing the wheel, coming up with a square, and then getting the majority of users (by virtue of being the default, not by being the best), is not so good. The complaint is that Canonical is doing the latter with a lot of things.
- andor 14y ago
  isn't the nature of Open Source to be constantly forking, iterating, and contributing new code when you think the existing stuff isn't good enough? You can always start from scratch if existing projects don't cut it. When talking about a windows manager (like Unity) or display manager (like Mir), starting from scratch is, financially, a pretty big decision, so you should make it an informed decision. The weird thing is that Canonical never even contacted the Wayland developers. It's weird because they should be interested in any mistakes Wayland made on their way (to not make them again), and because it's so easy in the open source community. If you find a bug in your Intel graphics driver you just go to freenode and talk to the developer that wrote that code. Same for Wayland, and most other projects. If they really want to be better than Wayland, they should learn from Wayland's mistakes, not make the same mistakes again.
eliben 14y ago
I like it how Google Plus is being used as a micro-blogging platform
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mongol 14y ago
What will be the effects of this fragmentation? For example, will we see Firefox for Mir and Firefox for X and Firefox for Wayland? Is there a risk that one window system will be without applications? I am too distanced to draw these conclusions myself.

70 points by cs702 14y ago

networked 14y ago

>4) We need server-side buffer allocation for ARM hardware; Could someone explain why?

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Something... something... support Android graphics drivers. Even though the Wayland devs have said that this is possible in Wayland or with some modifications.
ibotty 14y ago
something was said about it in irc a few days ago. i am not competent enough to paraphrase the reason. so here is the quote from http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1 http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1 00:15 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: why do you guys want server-allocated buffers? 00:15 <RAOF> Prf_Jakob: Mostly arm damage, there. 00:15 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: so thats whats its really about then? Closed source drivers? 00:16 <RAOF> No - arm hardware (apparently) has insane constraints that make server allocation more attractive. 00:16 <RAOF> eg - you have at most 6 buffers that are framebuffer-compatible. 00:16 <krh> we have those GPUs at intel too 00:17 <krh> weston runs on those (note that daniel stone said: 00:35 <daniels> RAOF: fwiw, i've got a wayland backend for arm hardware which does server-side allocation right now. didn't require one single change to any of the clients, or even compositors. it's all internal to the egl stack. )
- zanny 14y ago
  I have a bad feeling this G+ post is about to be ripped apart as badly as the initial wiki debacle. I wonder when people will realize, though, that as Canonical tries to justify itself on technical merits and having to backpedal every time, their answer of "we want to control it so we can move it and change it as we want to without having to wait for consensus or forking" is not good, but legitimate.

GhotiFish 14y ago

for the record. this: "ranging from the sensible (we want to write our own display serve so that we can control it)" is sensible to him. What the hell is going on at Canonical? I can't imagine how BADLY mir will damage desktop development in linux if Canonical actually forces its adoption and then holds the main repository. It would have to be forked to get it away from them. Are we even allowed to fork CCA code? Why do I get the feeling that if any of this happens, canonical is going to be suing linux end users. what a mess.

asb 14y ago
He means it's a sensible speculation to make, not necessarily that it's a good reason for Canonical to start Mir.
marcoperaza 14y ago
Why wouldn't you be able to fork Mir? The open source licenses used explicitly allow that. Disagree with Canonical on strategy if you want, but spreading FUD about lawsuits is misinformed at best, maliciously dishonest at worst.
- zanny 14y ago
  If you for Mir you can't accomplish anything by doing so because the drivers target the reference implementation. It is why you don't see prolific display servers all about like you do text editors, terminal emulators, or music players. And as Mir changes, and as those changes prompt changes in the drivers that run Mir, and derivative project ends up having to adopt those changes to continue using newer drivers. And unless the developers of a Mir fork also plan on maintaining patches to all the GUI toolkits and compositors to support their fork, they also need to emulate Mir's behavior in relation to the rest of the upwards stack.
  - tmzt 14y ago
    Though if there is a well defined and stable driver ABI compatibility shouldn't really be a problem.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Mark is needlessly caustic in these comments, in my opinion.

ihsw 14y ago
The entire exchange reads like disgruntled co-workers doing nothing but accusing and blaming each-other, and Mark's comments may be needlessly volatile however it's not misdirected. It's a shining example of office politics spilling over to the open-source community.
da_n 14y ago
I wouldn't say it was needless. As far as I'm concerned, it is the KDE and Wayland guys who have come out screaming in a very public, very vitriolic attack against Ubuntu. No matter what side of the argument you stand on, you can't deny that they have been taking a shit on the Ubuntu brand (although a lot of the worst comments have been deleted it appears). It is no wonder Mark is reacting in a caustic manner in my opinion.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I sympathize with them. I'm still seeing mistruths about Wayland all over the Internet as a result of that highly inaccurate (at least initially, they've editted it) MirSpec document.
- tjdetwiler 14y ago
  Personally I have higher standards for professionalism for someone in Mark's position vs the KDE/Wayland guys.
- burntsushi 14y ago
  > it is the KDE and Wayland guys who have come out screaming in a very public, very vitriolic attack against Ubuntu When blatantly false things are stated about your project by an organization as big as Canonical, one really can't blame them for expressing frustration. Especially when there is FUD about Wayland everywhere you go.
14y ago

bjourne 14y ago

It's well known that Canonical likes to do things their way and maybe suffers from a slight NIH syndrome. But do people have to be so upset about it? Maybe Rogers explanation is completely wrong and the real reason is "we thought it would be fun to write a new display server!" Does it matter? Saying "you're increasing desktop fragmentation" is silly and implies that writing Mir is somehow worse than writing no code at all. Graphics on desktop Linux currently kind of sucks. Windows and OS X are years ahead while we are stuck on X11 with flakey, sometimes-working, compiz-quality 3d effects. I think any effort to remedy that situation should be cherised.

vidarh 14y ago
I think it boils down to people being upset because Canonical through Ubuntu actually has the power to make Mir a real contender just like that, and it may very well leave Wayland in the dust due to internal discussions in Canonical rather than gaining acceptance by the community first Everything else seems like excuses to me. And while I use Ubuntu, and Mir sounds appealing, especially given my experience with other Ubuntu projects (including Unity, which I love), I don't particularly like this approach either. Though I have no reason to think I won't stick with Ubuntu.
dscrd 14y ago
>Saying "you're increasing desktop fragmentation" is silly and implies that writing Mir is somehow worse than writing no code at all. Nope. The logical option to writing Mir is not "no code at all" but contributing code and influence to supporting Wayland.
- fingerprinter 14y ago
  Why? What if Wayland and Mir have different goals? What if the venn-diagram overlap of those goals is less than ideal for Ubuntu and where it is going? Look at the absolute MESS that compiz, x and other things in Linux have had b/c of the "support all the things" attitude. The simple FACT is that it is much easier to be exceedingly great at a small subset of things than a large super set of things. Mir is specific and exact to what Canonical wants and needs out of Ubuntu. Wayland is a GENERAL solution that, sure, Canonical could influence, but would ultimately need to be more than just what Canonical needs. That means, you guessed it, bugs, rough corners, things that aren't supported. It's called focus. Canonical is focusing on delivering an EXPERIENCE and they decided they could do it better in this approach. I agree with this b/c of 1. history 2. experience and 3. the current state of the various projects. And don't forget that the code is going to be open source. And I don't understand why this is a problem in the linux world when the web world this is typically encouraged as "the best project will win". Do we need Derby, Backbone, Meteor, Tower, Express, Knockout etc etc etc? What about Rails, Sinatra, Camping, Padrino? Django, Flask, Pyramid? Riak,Mongo,Couch? Why can't they all join forces and "contribute code and influence"? In the web world, this is kind of encouraged and seen as good for competition. In the linux world is it seen as "not being a good community member". It's fuckin' bullshit.

yarrel 14y ago

"What can we do next to screw up Linux?"

freehunter 14y ago
No one can screw up Linux. It's open source and there's a huge and disparate community behind many projects spanning thousands of use cases. Even if Ubuntu somehow managed to go closed source and charge a mandatory license fee, Linux would still be Linux. Ubuntu is not the only project, by far. And you wonder why Shuttleworth is getting pissed at you guys.

AnIrishDuck 14y ago

> Weston, the reference Wayland compositor, is a test-bed. It's for the development of the Wayland protocol, not for being an actual desktop shell. We could have forked Weston and bent it to our will, but we're on a bit of an automated-testing run at the moment, and it's generally hard to retro-fit tests onto an existing codebase. Weston has some tests, but we want super-awesome-tested code. I'd accept this as reason alone to go with Mir, assuming it's correct. My experience with window managers on linux has been riddled with constant bugs and regressions that are the hallmark of software that isn't adequately tested. And he's absolutely right. If code isn't designed ahead of time to be modular and decoupled (testable), you're going to have a hell of a time refactoring it later to get good test coverage. I'm not asserting Weston is these things. But, accepting what Christopher says here, Canonical might actually be justified in creating Mir. I'd especially be interested in hearing if someone can refute the mentioned point.

ibotty 14y ago
kwin will be its own wayland compositor, gnome's mutter will be its own compositor. why didn't canonical create unity as its own wayland compositor? (in other words: criticizing weston is a strawman)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- SEMW 14y ago
  The section the GP quoted was not the entire article. Rogers went on to end the quoted paragraph with the rhetorical question "We don't want Weston, but maybe we want Wayland?", and went on to address that question in the rest of the article. Whether or not you agree with the chain of reasoning, pretending he never wrote anything other than a single step in it, and calling that a "strawman" on the grounds that it isn't a whole chain, is a little silly.
lmm 14y ago
He's wrong. Refactoring existing code to make it testable is not easy, but it's a lot easier than rewriting it from scratch, and more effective too.

shmerl 14y ago

I didn't get the answer. Why couldn't they work with Wayland to build the missing pieces? Or Wayland developers had some principal objections? It looks like Canonical didn't even make an attempt to collaborate. That's the main point of criticism. > the upsides of doing our own thing - we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review That's exactly the NIH problem. So in essence - no real reason, except selfish interests. > I'm particularly excited about our engagements with NVIDIA and AMD; although it's early days, I'm hopeful we can get a solution for “but what about proprietary drivers?” not just for Mir, but for everyone. At least this part sounds good. If drivers can be shared - hardware fragmentation will be avoided - (i.e. Wayland will reuse the same drivers especially on mobile).

adamors 14y ago
Shuttleworth actually goes on to say in the comments "The very people protesting their super-collaborative credentials have a long history of being super-antagonistic to Ubuntu in practice." I don't think it's even the NIH problem it's just sheer delusion.

freehunter 14y ago

I do wish that Canonical would fix their SSL issue. Here is what I see when I visit from Chrome [1]. This is particularly frustrating because when I click proceed, this is the next thing I see [2]. I surely am not going to make an SSL exception in our corporate proxy just because Canonical can't fix their certificates. [1] http://i.imgur.com/UMST00Q.png http://i.imgur.com/UMST00Q.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/iv4ZCaq.png http://i.imgur.com/iv4ZCaq.png

Osiris 14y ago

I find it interesting in the comments that most people are claiming that Canonical's time would be better spent contributing to existing projects, but isn't the nature of Open Source to be constantly forking, iterating, and contributing new code when you think the existing stuff isn't good enough? Aren't these attitudes the basis of why many subsystems in Linux have been around for decades? Others complain about fragmentation, which is another obtuse argument when you count the number Linux distributions available, the number of open source packages, and the entire nature of GitHub with their "please fork me" button. Open Source is by nature fragmented. If they want to go run off and do their own thing, what's the problem? It's their time and money. If what they write is crap, no other distributions will use it. If it's awesome, it has a lot of potential, but the community should decide after it's released, not before.

Shish2k 14y ago
Forking, iterating, and contributing new code are all good things. Reinventing the wheel, coming up with a square, and then getting the majority of users (by virtue of being the default, not by being the best), is not so good. The complaint is that Canonical is doing the latter with a lot of things.
andor 14y ago
isn't the nature of Open Source to be constantly forking, iterating, and contributing new code when you think the existing stuff isn't good enough? You can always start from scratch if existing projects don't cut it. When talking about a windows manager (like Unity) or display manager (like Mir), starting from scratch is, financially, a pretty big decision, so you should make it an informed decision. The weird thing is that Canonical never even contacted the Wayland developers. It's weird because they should be interested in any mistakes Wayland made on their way (to not make them again), and because it's so easy in the open source community. If you find a bug in your Intel graphics driver you just go to freenode and talk to the developer that wrote that code. Same for Wayland, and most other projects. If they really want to be better than Wayland, they should learn from Wayland's mistakes, not make the same mistakes again.

eliben 14y ago

I like it how Google Plus is being used as a micro-blogging platform

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mongol 14y ago

What will be the effects of this fragmentation? For example, will we see Firefox for Mir and Firefox for X and Firefox for Wayland? Is there a risk that one window system will be without applications? I am too distanced to draw these conclusions myself.