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Can someone summarize the story in a way that doesn't presuppose prior knowledge of what Mir or XMir is, and who isn't familiar with the Ubuntu-Intel history?
by raldi 13y ago
Can someone summarize the story in a way that doesn't presuppose prior knowledge of what Mir or XMir is, and who isn't familiar with the Ubuntu-Intel history?
Free karma if you do!
- SEJeff 13y agoX.org is an ancient beast that works, but is creaky. Intel has really been leading the charge to develop a new display server named Wayland. After much publicity from none other than Mark Shuttleworth about how Ubuntu was going to adopt Wayland, they decided to write their own display server from scratch named XMir. They want to use the same code for Ubuntu on phones, desktops, tablets. Intel doesn't much care to support anything other than Wayland because after 10+ years of X.org, they know better than anyone (most of all Canonical) what is best when it comes to display servers. They are putting all of their weight behind Wayland and don't see XMir as a viable future. As a result, they made a decision to not support it upstream. Their driver their call. Seems relatively cut and dry to me. As usual, another case where Canonical can't play with the rest of the open source community. Edit to add all below: I would also highly suggest anyone curious to read: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_wayland_situation&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_wayland... http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/26254.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/26254.html Those two articles are both critical of Mir, but are also from some very senior developers in the low level Linux/X related plumbing of Linux. I'd argue they are more qualified to speak about the failings of X than the Mir developers primarily because they've been the people fixing it's bugs the past many years.
- Cogito 13y ago== Backstory == The X Window System (known as X11 - 11th version) is currently the predominant way for Linux users to use a graphical interface, specifically a windowed interface. It is old and was designed for a purpose that doesn't match current usage nor technology. For this reason, a number of projects have risen to replace X11. 'Wayland' is the best supported of these projects, whilst 'Mir' is similar but has much less support. Mir was started specifically for Ubuntu, and has caused significant controversy in the community. Until these new projects are completed, and in order to support legacy software written for X, bridges that allow X11 compatible software to run on Wayland or Mir have been created. These are called XWayland and XMir respectively. == Current Story == The open source Intel drivers support X11, and increasingly will support Wayland (not sure on current state of this). Canonical wrote a patchset that adds support for Mir to the Intel drivers, and requested that this be included in the main Intel project. Intel has, for seemingly political reasons, denied that request. Canonical will thus have to maintain the patches themselves (it is common for many distributions to maintain patchsets in this way). If anyone else wanted to use Mir, and use Canonical's XMir bridge, they would need to source it from Canonical directly rather than from the main Intel repository. It seems that Intel doesn't want to support multiple new windowing projects, and has backed Wayland over Mir (as have many others in the community).
- raldi 13y agoThat was spectacular, thanks -- everyone give this guy some karma!
- nitrogen 13y agoDoes anyone know if Intel could just expose an API that is entirely agnostic of the display server, so Wayland, Mir, XMir, or some random other project could all use the same interface and get full functionality?
- wmf 13y agoI thought that API was KMS/DRM, but maybe it's not enough.