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Wayland - Beyond X (The H)Wayland - Beyond X (The H)Posted Feb 15, 2012 15:51 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Wayland - Beyond X (The H) by Cyberax Parent article: Wayland - Beyond X (The H)
The x86 real mode emulator is there to handle userspace modesetting for cards for which initialization requires the execution of x86 BIOS code without requiring the machine to be an x86 (or to allow it to happen while the x86 is in long mode), and which don't have enough information provided in another form (e.g. as tables) to permit reliable initialization in any other way. Among other things this includes all pre-ATOMBIOS Radeon cards, so this piece of ugly is not going away until userspace modesetting does.
If Wayland is going to drop that, it's dropping UMS as well (which is quite plausible).
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Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 15, 2012 16:02 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Wayland have never used UMS (and I don't think it ever would), it relies on KMS.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 15, 2012 18:37 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
well, if you were to take the X codebase and drop every driver that doesn't use KMS, and then further limit your target platform to Linux (the only OS with KMS), there is a HUGE amount of code that you could drop.
but as long as you want to provide _any_ output on these other systems, you need to have all this 'cruft' in the codebase.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 15, 2012 21:10 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] but as long as you want to provide _any_ output on these other systems, you need to have all this 'cruft' in the codebase. Well, the logical conclusion says that there will be no Wayland support for these systems. Not a big loss. P.S. You can as well complain that Wayland will not support X terminals.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 16, 2012 6:34 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> Not a big loss.
Uh huh. So no cross platform, no network transparency and mixing mechanism and policy. Fail, fail and fail. Not seeing any Win to balance it so Meh. Sure Lennart Pottering isn't involved in this project? Seems to have the same trademark militant rejection of every single philosophical underpining that made UNIX/X/GNU a winner.
And notice how all three are under active attack, Pottering is hammering away at the core assumptions of UNIX, Wayland is directly aimed at the key product differentiators that made X a legend and we are suddenly seeing concentrated attacks on GNU and the GPL. Hmmm.. If you can't beat em straight up, make a long march through thier institutions and gut em from within? I guess the endpoint pf all this is a GNOME 4 written in Mono, locked to local display on Wayland and licensed under BSD. Bah.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 16, 2012 9:38 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Sure Lennart Pottering isn't involved in this project? Nope. Net yet, anyway. Seems to have the same trademark militant rejection of every single philosophical underpining that made UNIX/X/GNU a winner. s/winner/looser/ UNIX/X/GNU already lost the workstations, desktops, tablet and mobile. What's left? Ah, server… Care to explain where exactly X11 is a big win on server? AFAICS server Linux thrives in spite of X11, not because of X11. I guess the endpoint pf all this is a GNOME 4 written in Mono, locked to local display on Wayland and licensed under BSD. Well, if this will finally make the platform usable for normal people then it still will be a win. So no cross platform, no network transparency and mixing mechanism and policy. Fail, fail and fail. Not seeing any Win to balance it so Meh. The win is supposedly simpler and more robust codebase which will make it possible to write snappier, more fluid interfaces. If the promise will be fulfilled then the whole exercise will be justified, otherwise Wayland will be just an article in a Wikipedia.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 16, 2012 12:12 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] > s/winner/looser/ It's not a "loser" for the many people who are using it right now. > Well, if this will finally make the platform usable for normal people then it still will be a win. If making it usable for some hypothetical "normal people" means making it unusable for the current users, that's not a win.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 16, 2012 14:49 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If making it usable for some hypothetical "normal people" means making it unusable for the current users, that's not a win. It's free software. Current users can use current version of the stack or even create a fork - it's to them. If Wayland will lose few existing users and gain a lot new users it will still be a net win. Yes, it's a gamble, but it's well-considered gamble.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 17, 2012 9:38 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
To co-opt certain language that's been popular recently, Linux currently is for the 1 %, not the 99 %. You can afford to lose some of that 1 % if you gain nearly any fraction of the 99 %: number of users would increase dramatically.
And as you correctly observed earlier, traditional Linux's biggest problem right now is that it does not have enough users, and that is an existential threat because it means no games, no hardware support, and eventually not even computers to run it on. We probably need customer demand for Linux to even have a long-term future. This problem must be fixed, and we're going to need kick-ass local graphics among other things. I'm sure that we can do better than X network transparency also, because it's at least possible when we finally start to seriously look into doing it at toolkit level.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 16, 2012 14:01 UTC (Thu) by michich (subscriber, #17902) [Link]
> So no cross platform, no network transparency and mixing mechanism and policy. [...] Sure Lennart Pottering isn't involved in this project?
Do you realize that the guy gave you workable network transparency for audio?
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 16, 2012 18:02 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>I guess the endpoint pf all this is a GNOME 4 written in Mono, locked to local display on Wayland and licensed under BSD. Bah.
You are describing Android. And yeah, it's a win - it's the most popular OS for end-users right now.
Wayland - Beyond X (The H) Posted Feb 16, 2012 22:47 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] But those users already have an operating system they like (one that is already FLOSS, even). So how can there be there any good reason to change GNOME (and the underlying infrastructure it uses) to make it more like Android? (And if your answer is something like "Android isn't really FLOSS", then the real solution to that is that we need to have unlocked hardware capable of running the community-developed Android rebuilds like CyanogenMod and Replicant on, and to educate the public about why locked-down hardware is bad.)
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